Romanians and Romanian Gypsies

In Romania, the gypsies are seen as a separate nation of people (they even have their own kings and emperors, and their own set of laws, unrecognised by the state, of course), even if they have Romanian citizenship and ID cards. Romanians hate the Romanian Gypsies because wherever they go they screw things up and then they are labeled by their citizenship in the press. The Romanian people then are feared as a whole, even though, statistically speaking, the good/bad people ratio isn't that much different from any other European country (the UK included).

To make matters worse, the Gypsy ethnic group is called "Roma" and "Romani", which collides with "Romanian", even though the terms are similar only by coincidence, not by relation. The Government itself is taking steps, when it can, to dissociate the terms. The ID cards and passports now use the country identification "ROU" (from French "Roumain", "Roumanie"), replacing the age old "ROM" moniker, because "rom" in Romanian means means "gypsy", "member of the Romani people", and foreigners saw "ROM" as meaning "gypsy" as well.

Because the deeds done by these people reach the headlines so fast, the Romanian people are furious. Hacking attempts are just one way of expressing this, and just happen to be a high profile one. I don't condone hacking, mainly because it just adds petrol to the fire, but other means of making it clear that not all Romanians are bad seem to be inadequate in the face of tabloid-like articles.

I've worked on a few European programmes on "gypsy integration", in Romania, and I can tell that it's an excruciating job trying any kind of integration for these people. They'll happily participate in your integration programmes, giving you the impression that they're co-operating and your programme is successful, yet as soon as you're gone, they're back at their antics, making fun of you, behind your back, of how naive you are investing so much money in "educating" them. The only ones profiting from this are the gypsies themselves, yet it has to be tried, hoping that one day a tipping point will be reached.

The Romanians are pissed because they're put in the same pot as the gypsies, and they find this to be very unfair. If you read the papers across Europe, you'll always find mixed articles: one day a Romanian rapes the a woman and/or kills her, the next day a Romanian is killed while protecting somebody from a native. The Romanians are pissed also because the first kind of article reaches first page on the likes of Daily Mail, while the second kind is buried deep on page 66 or something, in small print, on a side column. But then again, that's also true about English, French, American, etc. paedophiles that come to Romania for sex with under-age children, or to adopt children for their internal organs, or they fatally hit a person with their car and they flee to their home country under diplomatic immunity, and so on.

We all have weeds, and the Romanians just happen to show up more often than not.

While writing this, I remembered a film called "Gadjo Dilo". If you can get your hands on it, please watch it. There's one scene in there which shows quite well both the "native" Romanian temper and the Romanian gypsy temper, where a Romanian guy attempts a verbal bad joke about a gypsy - both of them in the same bar, drinking -, in good old Romanian tradition, and the gypsy, showing that he can take a joke, attempts a practical joke of his own: in anger, he throws a glass into the Romanian's face, killing him, in good old gypsy tradition (which typically involves ninja swords, but anything will do if you don't have one around).

Thanks for reading.