10Sep2014

Despite a millennium of shared history with Europeans, Roma remain one of the Continent’s most marginalized and underserved groups. A 2012 report jointly compiled by the United Nations Development Program and the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency found that only 15 percent of Roma adults surveyed “have completed upper-secondary general education, versus more than 70 percent of the majority population living nearby.” Similarly, less than 30 percent of Roma surveyed were employed in an official capacity at the time of questioning, and roughly 45 percent “live in households lacking at least one of the following: an indoor kitchen, toilet, shower or bath, or electricity.”

Aside from wide-scale poverty, European Roma are regularly victims of “racism, discrimination and social exclusion.” The report found that “a significant portion of Roma respondents said that they have experienced discriminatory treatment because of their ethnic origin in the 12 months preceding the survey. The proportions range from more than 25 percent in Romania to around 60 percent in the Czech Republic, Greece, Italy and Poland.”

Earlier this year, The New York Times reported on the brutal beating of a 17-year-old Roma boy by a gang of 20 local men in the French town of Pierrefitte-sur-Seine. Last year, two blond, blue-eyed Irish Roma children were seized when authorities suspected their more darkly complexioned parents had abducted them. The children were returned after DNA testing confirmed parenthood.

In countries outside the European Union, such as Albania — which, according to the World Bank, has the fourth-lowest gross domestic product per capita on the Continent (ahead of Ukraine, Kosovo and Moldova) and a national G.D.P. ranked between that of Chad and Zimbabwe — the plight of the Roma is especially dire.

“Roma,” a 10-minute documentary shot, written and produced by the British filmmaker Sam Davis, shines a light on this desperately neglected, actively alienated community.

Albanian Roma are especially long-suffering. Many were forcibly expelled from the country during the Albanian rebellion of 1997, also known as the Pyramid Crisis. One interviewee recalls the infamously ruthless ethnic-Albanian mafia descending on Roma shantytowns at the height of unrest: “They came armed with AK-47s and cast us out from our homes. They then seized our homes.”

Out of fear for their lives, many Roma fled to neighboring Greece, where they would live as refugees for more than a decade.

A large number of Albanian Roma are now returning to their home country. The economy is growing, unemployment is shrinking, and national politics are generally calmer. But life for the resident Roma community, as the video shows, is still quite dismal.

“We have been in Tirana for three years now,” says one of the interviewees, standing in front of a makeshift hut constructed among mountains of refuse — not a place one expects to find in Europe. “The Ministry of Social Affairs is not helping us at all,” she continues. “We don’t want their money, we want their help. Even dogs have a more decent life and home.”

Albania may be forging ahead, but it looks like the Roma, per usual, are being left behind.

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Photo credit: Yoan Valat/European Pressphoto Agency