The postponed people: the fourteen million gypsies of the world commemorate their day

Every April 8, the world commemorates the International Day of the Gypsy People, which aims to recognize the history, language and culture of this community and, at the same time, to make visible the discrimination that gypsies still suffer in various parts of the world.

About 300,000 gypsies live in Argentina, including many from Spain, Romania and Serbia, settled in particular in the city of Buenos Aires, the province of Buenos Aires and Cordoba. It is estimated that around 2 million Roma live in Latin America.

The date recalls the First World Gypsy Congress held in London on April 8, 1971, when the Gypsy flag and anthem were instituted.

The flag is green, which symbolizes the countryside, and blue, which symbolizes the countryside, with a red wagon wheel in the center which represents wishes for freedom of movement across borders.

The gypsy anthem, “Freeze, freeze” (I walked, I walked), was composed by Jarko Jovanovic to commemorate the gypsies who were victims of Nazism.

During the ‘Gypsy Holocaust’, also known as the Porraimos, It is estimated that at least a quarter of the Roma population in Europe has been exterminated and in some countries this figure reaches 90%.

the three quarters of the gypsies residing in Germany in 1933 were exterminated. Gypsy families, whose property was expropriated, were separated, sterilized and sent to concentration camps. Many were used as pieces of medical experiments.

According to historians, Heinrich Himmler built a reserve where “some pure Roma clans could move with a certain freedom in a kind of almost zoological redoubt”, Where they were also studied by scientists nazis.

Victims of poverty and discrimination

Seventy years later, the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed that the situation of the Roma community does not continue to be unfair.

It is guaranteed that 86% of Roma families live below the poverty line and 46% of households live in extreme poverty. In addition, the community has a child poverty rate that rises to 89% (51% extreme child poverty), according to the NGO Secretariado Gitano.

The organization has shown that the 79% of Roma households do not have calculatedras and many of them also do not have access to the Internet, which will have devastating consequences for Roma children when the world is forced to go to school from their homes.

The “antigitanism“Is, however, the biggest of their problems, according to the Spanish lawyer Filigree shepherdess, author of a book that deals with discrimination against this community.

“Anti-Gypsyism continues. The concept that they are in a lower echelon of humanity continues to this day although there are no specific laws against them “, He said.

In Argentina, the Asociación Identidad Cultural Romaní de la Argentina (Aicra) has repeatedly denounced in recent years the discrimination against Roma, usually accused of theft or implicated in criminal acts.

Tenacious people

• The Gypsies left their homeland at the end of the first millennium after Christ following the invasion of Muslim conquerors.
• In the 9th century, the gypsies fled India to escape the genocide triggered by the Islamic invasion.
• In Western Europe, at the beginning of the 15th century, the Roma were well received, but it did not take long for them to start settling. hunt them down, hunt them down and eliminate them as vagrants, beggars and the criminals.
• The Catholic monarchs of Spain enacted tough laws to control them, with the aim of making them abandon their language and customs.
• Portugal arrested gypsies and condemned them to settle in its colony, in the hope that they would collaborate in the population of its overseas territories.
• The arrival of the gypsies in Latin America began in the 15th century following the persecution of the Catholic monarchies of Spain and Portugal.
• It was not until the end of the 18th century that some European countries have started to take measures to improve the situation of Roma then the division between the sedentary, the semi-sedentary and the itinerant appeared.

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