Staging Citizenship. Ioana Szeman

Staging Citizenship - Ioana Szeman


Скачать книгу
in the first sense. The EU does not espouse multicultural policies, even though legal, rights-based non-discrimination is intrinsic to EU legislation in an increasingly multicultural (in the first sense) EU. The few EU member states that had explicit multicultural legislation in the past, such as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, have replaced multiculturalism as a political strategy with measures to integrate migrants, especially Muslims.

image

      ‘We Will Build a Beautiful Future Together’

      NGO Historiography, Roma Culture and Monoethnic Nationalism

      We must tell our children that, six decades ago, children just like them were sent by the Romanian state to die of starvation and cold. We must tell mothers in Romania that the Romanian state killed Roma mothers through subjugation and misery. We must also mention that Roma men fighting for the homeland were taken out of the army and sent between Denester and Bug. Education in Romania has the duty to inform and teach the new generations about the Holocaust, just as it has a duty to talk about the period of Roma slavery or about the crimes of Communism.

      —Patrasconiu, ‘Exterminarea Ţiganilor’

      So went former Romanian President Traian Băsescu’s address for Holocaust Memorial day on 22 October 2007, when he decorated three Holocaust survivors with the National Order of Faithful Service. Denester and Bug, mentioned in his speech, are the two rivers (in present-day Ukraine) that mark the territory where an estimated 25,000 Roma were deported by the Romanian state during World War II and approximately 11,000 lost their lives. Those who returned, including the three survivors decorated at the event, had never before been considered Holocaust victims, as Romania had failed to acknowledge its contribution to the Holocaust until recent EU negotiations and pressure from Israel. The President’s speech included a few sentences in Romani, and a plea to the EU: ‘We need a European policy for Roma. … There is, of course, a need for financial resources, because, for the time being, since the revolution, the funds allocated for the social inclusion of Roma have been insignificant’ (Patrasconiu 2009, no page number). Băsescu ended his remarks with an apology and a promise for the future: ‘Forgive us, brothers and sisters, and we will build a beautiful future together’.

      In this chapter I focus on the 2002 Roma Fair held at the Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest – one of the first events on a national scale representing Roma culture post-1989 – and on political debates before and after EU accession about Roma slavery and the Roma Holocaust. I show how Romanian institutions and officials moulded Roma identity through spatial marginalization and commodification, demonstrated at the Roma Fair in the tension between the museum itself and the marginal spaces assigned to the Roma activists and participants.


Скачать книгу