Inspired by the French authorities’ solution of moving Roma from point A to point B, the Romanian authorities have planned and set underway the forcible evictions of Roma from makeshift settlements such as those to be found in cities including Cluj-Napoca (Pata-Rat and Garii) and Baia Mare (Craica, Pirita, Ferneziu). Some of these settlements date back to early ’90s. The authorities always tolerated them, verbally encouraging the Roma to build in the area and giving reassurances that nothing bad would ever happen to them. But today, campaigning on a ticket of inter-ethnic hatred, the same authorities have started forcible evictions whose sole motivation is the ethnic cleansing of cities.

Our humanity is as big as the distance between ourselves and the world’s real problems… This is why we can shed a tear for the starving kids of Africa but not give a damn about the desperate Roma kids living next door.

We ask of the Roma that they send their kids to school, but we never wonder whether those same kids can bathe or get a decent breakfast before attending classes. As they live in ramshackle dwellings, “bathing” is hardly the right word to describe the conditions in which these kids manage to wash. Without direct access to running water, each child or woman has to make five or six trips a day to collect water from a nearby pump. It is a task that would drive even Sisyphus insane.

Without heating or electricity the Roma lead a harder life today than in the Middle Ages — harder given that the gaps between them and other people were less visible then than they are today… The most fortunate of them have rigged makeshift electricity cables from the nearby blocks of flats. When you find out how much they pay for this bootlegged current, sufficient to power perhaps one light bulb (20 Euros a month), you realise that being poor doesn’t come cheap.

They do all our unpleasant chores, working for the companies that collect our garbage or clean our cities’ streets. They are never able to make ends meet, and so they are always in debt to the loan sharks. Living on less than 100 Euros a month, the public garbage dump serves as their supermarket.

Because we deem their traditions unimportant, pottery and other ancient Roma crafts struggle for survival. Because of their lack of education and discrimination against them on our part, we only hire them as day labourers, and then we spend all day worrying lest they steal a few pieces of fruit. Almost all the whole of the grape harvest is gathered using Roma labour.

I live in a country where people look at impoverished Roma people living in inhumane conditions and ask me whether they are thieves. I always answer them with a question that leaves them speechless. I ask: “How many thieves do you know who have to feed themselves out of the garbage?”

Yet they live their lives without asking too much. All they ask is not to be evicted, to be thrown out on the streets. All they ask is to be consulted and presented with alternatives for relocation. If segregation is the only thing that comes out of such relocation plans, then they ask to be left where they are. They realise that life is hard for people without an education, but no matter how poor they might be, they shouldn’t be denied the right to non-segregated social housing programmes. We deem them irresponsible for having so many children, but we seem to forget how many children our grandmothers used to have. If it weren’t for our grandmothers, we wouldn’t be here today…

Protected by current legislation, or rather the lack of it, this country’s racists fail to understand the real power of the Roma people. In less than a hundred years, they will be the majority population of Romania. How ironic it is that we want to get rid of them when our survival as a nation depends on them!

This is Europe at its worst… It doesn’t have to be that way… If South Africa were forcibly to send other African citizens back to their countries of origin, Europeans would find that unacceptable and human right activists would demand all kinds of measures to put a stop to it…

When France does it, everybody turns a blind eye…

Where is the democracy in that?