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Roma Nation Day – 2005

March Against Racism, London, 9 April 2005

Roma Nation Day – 2005: March Against Racism

On 8th April 1971 the first World Roma Congress met at Chelsfield in southeast London. It called for Roma self-determination and international unity and the delegates unanimously rejected all of the names given to them by outsiders, including Gypsy (or Gipsy), still often used in English, which the community viewed as insulting. Both Rom and Romany have also been in use in English since the 19th Century, but throughout Europe the term Roma is now officially used, though in German-speaking countries the name Sinti is common.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people Linguistic and more recent DNA studies show that Roma originated in northwestern India around 1500 years ago and later migrated to Europe, reaching the Balkans around 900 years ago. They have long been subject to persecution and in some central and east European countries were slaves until the 1840s and 50s.

In 1930s Germany Roma in Germany were stripped of their citizenship and many were interned and there was a programme of compulsory sterilisation. In 1942 the Porajmos or Romani Holocaust began, with Roma being sent to extermination camps. Estimates vary wildly of the number killed in Germany and German occupied territories, between 200,000 and 1,500,000.

Roma still suffer considerable persecution in some countries including Romania, and the end of communist control has led to an increase in prejudice and persecution there and elsewhere. And across all countries including our own there is still widespread denial about the persecution they still face.

8th April, the day of the first congress, was adopted in 1990 as the International Roma Day of Action. Perhaps because of that denial it has not received much attention.

Roma have generally taken on the predominant religions of the countries they have settled in and the London action began with a church service at St Jame’s Piccadilly before marching through central London. I photographed them outside the church and on the march, ending my pictures as they went up Charing Cross Road.

In my account on My London Diary in 2005 I used the term gypsy as this was still almost always used in the media and Roma was not widely understood. Commonly too, Roma are called ‘travellers’ although many Roma are settled and most ‘travellers‘ are not Roma. Here’s what I wrote in 2005:

After a church service commemorating the 500,000 Roma murdered in the Nazi holocaust, Roma from several countries marched across London against the ethnic-cleansing of 30,000 gypsies from their own land and in protest over threatened evictions at Dale Farm, Essex, Smithy Fen, Cambridgeshire, and elsewhere.

After the march, gypsy Richard Sheridan was to announce that he was standing against sitting Tory MP John Baron at Billericay in the general election on 5th May 2005 in order to make the travellers’ voice heard. [He did not actually stand, but did attract some media attention to the cause.]

More pictures start here on My London Diary.

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UN Anti-Racism Day 2017 & 2023

Today, 18th march is the UN Anti-Racism Day, and in 2017 it was also a Saturday, and tens of thousands marched through London, starting as they will today outside the BBC and ending with a large rally in Westminster.

Today’s march, as in 2017, is organised by Stand Up to Racism, Unite Against Fascism and Love Music, Hate Racism and the TUC and supported by many other groups, including football fans from around the country who will be wearing team colours.

This years march is perhaps even more important, with the UK Government pursuing clearly racist policies against immigrants in last year’s Nationality and Borders Act, its attempt to deport refugees to Rwanda and Suella Braverman’s recently announced Illegal Migration Bill.

*Phyll Opoku of PCS ‘Stand Up to Racism’*

Football fans have been energised by the BBC’s reaction to Gary Lineker’s tweet. He was clearly correct in observing the hostile anti-refugees language used by the government to language used in Germany in the 1930s. They say the government are trying to stir up division and racism to deflect attention from their multiple crises and turn refugees into scapegoats.

Unfortunately it isn’t just the government, but also the official opposition who continue to up the ante over immigration, refusing to stand up to the government with any real attempt to improve our treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. Real opposition to racism has been left to a few increasingly isolated figures on the left of the party – including many of those who have been ejected for supposed anti-semitism, increasingly being used to expel Jewish members who support the Palestinian people. And of course left to footballers or former footballers.

Even Theresa May, who the 2017 march was strongly opposed to for promoting racist measures against immigrants and in particular Muslims in concert with Donald Trump has found Braverman’s latest proposals which will break international law on the human rights of migrants a step too far.

The 2023 march organisers say:

In Britain we face a crisis-ridden government attempting to use racism to make ordinary people pay for the cost of living crisis. The ‘Rwanda plan’, the Nationality and Borders Act, racist deportations and the hostile environment for refugees and migrants are all about divide and rule.

The government deny the reality of institutional racism – despite massively disproportionate deaths in black communities during the pandemic – and the reality of deaths in police custody, racist stop and search and discrimination across society.

Internationally we are seeing the growth of the racist and fascist right and an alarming rise in Islamophobia, antisemitism, Sinophobia, anti East/South East Asian racism and attacks on Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.

Despite a rail strike this Saturday I hope to be there later today, again taking photographs and marching with many thousands of others.

Much more from the 2017 march and rally on My London Diary: Thousands March Against Racism.

Dale Farm March Against Eviction – 2011

I had been following the events around Dale Farm with interest, but had decided that travelling to the site where some colleagues in the NUJ had been covering events for some time was too difficult and time-consuming. What was happening there was already getting considerable media coverage and I could add little to it and my time and very limited resources would be better spent on less high profile events.

So I’d not been to Dale Farm, and didn’t go to the eviction which finally took place on 19th October, but my interest in what was taking place there did prompt me to go down to a protest march from Wickford Station to the Dale Farm site on Saturday 10th September 2011.

My earliest involvement with travellers had been in the 1960s, when a group who had been evicted from other sites in the city encamped for some time on land close to and owned by the university. Along with many other students I went to the site and met many of the residents as well as attempting to stop the university from evicting them.

*There was a short service before the march*

Travellers move around during much of the year but during winter want to settle in a fixed site. Local authorities have the powers to provide sits but not a duty to do so. In January 2011 according to the twice-annual government surveys there were roughly 18,000 traveller caravans with almost 7,000 on authorised public sites and a further 8,000 on authorised private sties, with around 2,500 on unauthorised sites.

*Euro MP Richard Howitt talking to Dale Farm residents on the march*

In 2021 research showed long waiting lists for pitches on public sites, with almost 1700 on the list but only 59 permanent and 42 transit pitches available nationwide. And many of those available had be labelled as “not fit to use” and “in a terrible state” by locals, with 20 having no electricity available. Travellers call for an end to the increasing harassment of those on unauthorised land and a statutory duty on authorities to meet the need to provide sites – and police also see this as the solution to unauthorised encampments.

*Dale Farm children outside the gates of Cray’s Hill Primary School*

Wikipedia states that Travellers first settled around Dale Farm in the 1960s on Green Belt land that was in use as an unauthorised scrap yard. Eventually following legal battles with Basildon Council some on a part of the site were granted limited permission to remain on a small area of the site, Oak Farm, and are still there. Travellers bought the land from the scrap dealer who had been bankrupted by costs for breaching Green Belt provision in 2002 and the site began to grow, becoming the largest Traveller site in Europe.

*Police escort the march closely as it nears Dale Farm*

The council, who had used part of the site as a dumping ground for tarmac and rubble from roadworks refused to give any further permissions on the grounds it was Green Belt, and legal battles continued. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott became involved in 2003 with an order intended to give the Travellers and Basildon Council two years to come to an agreement, but they made no progress. Legal battles continued, with the residents winning their case in the High Court in 2008 only to see this reversed by the court of appeal in 2010.

*Anti-eviciton activists on the gates to Dale Farm*

The Wikipedia article gives considerable details on the legal battles and the process of eviction, carried out with considerable force by bailiffs and police, providing those press who had been barricaded inside the site with residents for some days with some dramatic images. Many of the travellers had left not long after this march several weeks before the eviction to avoid the violence, camping illegally elsewhere.

Years later the rubble of the former illegal settlement created by the eviction remained on the site in what the Daily Mail described as “polluted wasteland blighted by rubbish and the decaying remains” despite Basildon Council’s claim at the time of the eviction it would return the site to Green Belt. It is so bad that many Travellers in the adjoining legal site Oak Farm now want to leave the area.

*Secretary of the Roma Federation Grattan Puxon*

The march on Saturday 10th September took place while Travellers were still living on the site and hoping still to be able to stay there. My report in My London Diary gives a long account of the event and picture captions add to this.

As I noted in it, the only slight unpleasantness came not from the Travellers but one of their supporters who tried to stop the press coming on to the site. After around ten minutes one of the women leading the Travellers insisted we should be allowed in to report the rally.

Basildon Council had throughout seemed determined not to accept solutions to the battle proposed by others, including the Homes and Communities Agency who had put forward an alternative site, and it was hard not to see their attitude to the Travellers as fundamentally driven by racism. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination had a week or so before the march called on the Council to find a peaceful and appropriate solution and suspend the “immature and unwise” eviction, saying it would “disproportionately affect the lives of the Gypsy and Traveller families, particularly women, children and older people“.

March Supports Dale Farm Against Evictions