Address the Roma Question Now

Transitions Online, 24 June, 2009

Hungary can no longer afford to wait for someone else to provide answers to its most pressing social problem.

It is unclear why anyone would have wanted to hurt Jeno Koka, a 54-year-old man in Tiszalok-Ujtelep, north-eastern Hungary, who was shot in the chest with a 9mm handgun and killed just as he was leaving his home for work on 22 April.

The police are still investigating. Koka was a working man, described by local leaders as upright and friendly. He was married, was involved in no dodgy business deals and had no criminal record. No-one knows why he was gunned down.

It is no wonder, then, that many have wondered whether Koka was killed because he is part of Hungary's half-million strong Roma community. The Roma, or Gypsies, are a mostly poor ethnic group that tends to live in ghettos on the outskirts of former industrial centres, largely cut off from the majority Magyar society. They are often segregated at the workplace and in the school system, and lead a meagre existence mostly on day labour, benefits and petty crime.

Koka's murder was the latest in a string of unresolved killings targeting them since early 2008. The attacks have included firebombing houses and shooting the fleeing. Six Romas have been murdered and many more wounded. Many think that they are a response to three much-publicised murders committed by Gypsies over the last three years.

The Roma issue is fast shaping up to be Hungary's Big Problem - or indeed Eastern Europe's. It is already a powerful factor in politics. Jobbik, a far-right party that won three seats in the European Parliament earlier this month, ran on an explicit anti-Gypsy platform.

Jobbik have successfully dipped into a widespread feeling and fear among Magyars that Gypsies are criminals. Many might be. But increasingly, this is an ethnic conflict, driven by simplistic perceptions and a very real social-racial gap.

The idea that criminal behaviour is culturally and even racially inherent with the Roma seems to have some traction in Hungary. According to a 2005 poll, 62 per cent thought Gypsies as a group were more likely to be criminals. The justice system, too, seems tilted against them. Up to half of all prisoners are Roma, although they are no more than 5-7 per cent of the population.

Experts tend to think that the high crime rates that we see (or rather suspect, since there are no statistics) among the Roma are merely a function of their status as social and economic outcasts. There is even some evidence that crime rates among Magyars and Gypsies of similar economic and social background are similar.

But that misses the point: most Gypsies do belong to an underclass that seems increasingly cut-off from mainstream society. Generations of Roma know nothing but benefit-peddling and petty crime, more so than the Magyars, who are not shut out of the labour market and the school system because their skin is brown, says Szilvia Varro, a journalist covering Roma affairs. The point is that since many of these outcasts are Gypsy and most Gypsies are outcasts, the problem increasingly is a racial one.

The Roma are the biggest losers of the last twenty years. The heavy industries where they used to work are gone. Their low educational levels make it hard for them to find work elsewhere. They would have struggled anyway, even without the obstacle of ethnic discrimination. The gap between them and Magyar society has only grown as the Magyars' lot has improved hugely in the last ten years.

That the standard of discourse about the problem is so astonishingly low - more interested in apportioning blame than finding solutions - is unsurprising. It is typical of how most issues are debated in a society that has little tradition of open debate and where people have only lately discovered that they can say pretty much whatever they want.

Open anti-Semitism and anti-Roma instigation are largely tolerated because the lines have not been drawn. The Roma issue has been around for decades. But it's only blowing up now. It is the noise of the skeletons finally falling out of the cupboard after years of fearful and conspirational silence. These are the pains of a society going through dislocation because of fast but selected growth and growing freedoms.

The simplistic debate - such as there is - is playing into the hands of extremist forces, like Jobbik, who are at the moment the only party openly talking about the matter. The centre-right Fidesz party, which looks set to win next year's parliamentary elections, have offered no solutions.

Will the rising tide - once it starts rising again, that is - lift the ship of the Roma, too, lessening the fissures? Likely not. The problem is only becoming more acute: the proportion of Roma is expected to rise to 15 per cent of the population by 2050. They need help.

But government action has been half-hearted and largely ineffective. The education ministry tried to desegregate schools after 2002 but the effort slowed down in 2006. Earlier efforts included tying benefits to sending kids to school but this, too, was abandoned. EU-funded job creation programmes have gone nowhere, mostly because of the massive bureaucracy they involve.

The lack of a comprehensive strategy resulted in policy-wildcatting by some local councils that last year tried to withhold aid from Gypsies until they joined up for community service. This led to another massive public row which centred around the widely held perception that Gypsies don't like to work and have only themselves to blame for being unemployed.

Hungary allows limited self-government for the Roma but these councils have mostly failed to lessen their plight. There is no single political party that they would support, leaving their voting power diluted, although sheer numbers could turn them into kingmakers. They have few recognised national leaders, although in recent years Gypsies have made serious inroads in television and entertainment.

More needs to be done, perhaps through government-enforced positive discrimination programmes. Key is to make sure the Roma go back to work and their kids get back to school - the most important pillars of leading a normal life within mainstream society. This problem isn't going away through more foreign money or more EU - the usual ways of dodging challenges in Eastern Europe of late. This needs a solution here and it needs it now.