lobby for the immediate evacuation & medical treatment of around 650 refugees at a camp in Osterode Kosovo

Dear Colleague's

Please see UK Association of Gypsy Women - Annual Report 2009 on http://groups.yahoo.com/group/British_Roma/files/

UKAGW are embarking on a campaign to lobby for the immediate evacuation and medical treatment of around 650 refugees at a camp in Osterode Kosovo. They are living in what has been described as a hell-hole and where test carried out on the children in the camp show that they now have so much 'Lead' in their Blood' that medical equipment cannot measure it accurately!

We want to lobby your support in our appeal and quest for the immediate, effective and constructive change to the lives of those poor unfortunate people as soon as is humanly possible.

I have copied in my Colleague Shay Clipson who has taken on the responsibility to spearhead this mammoth campaign, Shay hopes to make a fact-finding mission to the camp in Kosovo as soon as possible. Shay will be first-line contact and will be happy to work and hear from individuals or organization that are able to significantly contribute to this campaign

UKAGW would sincerely appreciate your expertise, influence or indeed any help or support you are able to contribute to this mission.

The people on Osterode camp do not need another mission to highlight their suffering, the world is in full receipt of what is happening there, they deserve and need you to use your influence and expertise to secure effective change and not to abandon them to a future that is doomed which will only ensure further heartache and misery and inevitably their early death.

Please support this important humanitarian campaign.

May I take this opportunity to wish you all a very healthy, happy and successful New Year.


Kind regards

Rachel Francis-Ingham
Inclusion officer
Suite 03
Imperial Business Centre
Grange Road
Darlington
DL1 5NQ, UK

Phone: 01325-788281
Fax: 0161-8830440
Mobile: 07880-637591

E-mail: ukagw@ymail.com

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Imminent camp clearance of 700 Roma citizens in ethnic cleansing operation

“Imminent camp clearance of 700 Roma citizens who live in the camp, including seriously ill members and 300 children. It is an ethnic cleansing operation. An appeal to the European Commission, the council of Europe and the United Nations High Commissioner”.


“News has just reached us that the Italian authorities have decided to clear the Casilino 900 Roma settlement in Rome within the next three weeks”, say Roberto Malini, Matteo Pegoraro and Dario Picciau the co-presidents of the human rights organization EveryOne Group. “The Casilino 900 camp is the oldest Roma settlement in the capital.

The families (a total of about 700 people) have lived in the city for the last 40 years, after fleeing from the countries of the former Yugoslavia. The Roma live in disastrous health and sanitary conditions without any kind of assistance programme”, say the activists. “In recent years the institutions have spread terrible ideologies inspired by sentiments of racial hatred towards the Roma people of the Casilino 900 camp, accusing them of antisocial behaviour and being genetically inclined to commit crime”.

Recently, the European Commissioner for Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg, described the living conditions and the marginalization in which 300 children, pregnant women and many sick people were forced to live in as “intolerable”. “In spite of the marginalization, the prejudice and the numerous episodes of racism they are subjected to,” continue Malini, Pegoraro and Picciau, “the inhabitants who are able to are constantly in search of work and possibilities of integration.

The imminent camp clearance represents all that is irresponsible and inhuman, because the Comune di Roma has prepared no alternative lodgings or assistance for these soon-to-be-homeless people; no schooling programmes for the children; no support for the most dramatic social and medical cases; and no plans to keep families together - seeing family unity is fundamental in the Roma tradition. What is more, this clearance operation could put the health of Down Syndrome children at serious risk, as well as those suffering from heart problems, people receiving treatment with drugs and dialysis patients.

Several cancer patients live in the camp (who are undergoing cycles of chemotherapy) and both mentally and physically handicapped people. “The conditions they are forced to live in”, say the representatives of EveryOne, “make it difficult for the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations to provide support, According to Dr. Maurizio Di Marzio, (who is in charge of the camper van that has supplied health and social support to the Roma people in the Asl RmB area since 1999) inside the camp are many cases of TB, hepatitis, infectious skin diseases, gastro-intestinal problems and burns, particularly in children.

A camp clearance now, (especially in these freezing winter temperatures) would be a death sentence for the sick and the more vulnerable members of the camp, and a humanitarian crisis of incalculable proportions for all the others. In 2008, some delegations from the European Parliament and the EU Commission visited the camp. At the time the delegations reported the disastrous conditions of marginalization, the poverty and humanitarian crisis the camp’s inhabitants were forced to live in.

Despite this, the Rome authorities and the Italian authorities in general, did nothing at all to improve the situation and, in fact have allowed the Casilino camp to appear more and more like a Polish ghetto in the years of the Holocaust.

In any other civilized country”, concludes the human rights group, “the situation and problem of the Casilino 900 camp would have been tackled from the humanitarian point of view, not from a political or “public safety” point of view.

Instead, it is necessary to build a modern village, with full facilities on the present site, or on another suitable site. As an alternative, the institutions could supply lodgings and initiate an efficient schooling-employment programme, while offering social support to the sick, handicapped and the most vulnerable members of the community.

Unfortunately, the Mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, seems to be much more worried about banning demonstrations and protest sit-ins (to be organized by the humanitarian organizations in the event of ethnic cleansing operation in the camp) than in saving human lives.

We hope that the European Commission and Council will intervene rapidly, and if necessary take action and proceedings against the Italian authorities’ decision to clear the Casilino 900 camp without offering its inhabitants a dignified alternative.

It is also important that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights takes a determined stance against this proposed ethnic purge. EveryOne Group, the Them Romano Association, the European antiracist organization United, and the network of human rights associations will adopt every kind of civilized and non-violent action to prevent this humanitarian disaster and safeguard the fundamental rights of over 700 human beings already weakened by a long and terrible period of apartheid and persecution”.

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FACTORY of DEATH

At about 7 a.m. on the morning of February 25th in Pesaro (Italy), about 20 officers, (regular police and municipal police) entered the abandoned factory situated in Via Fermo, 49, where 30 Romanian Roma have been living for the last year.


Among them patients being treated at San Salvatore Hospital for heart problems and tumours; many women and nine minors, including a few-month-old baby. The authorities gave the order to clear the abandoned factory where the roma were living and dispersed the families.

Virgil Caldarar, one of the two Roma children who will never be born. They died in their mothers womb during (or immediately after) the tragic clearance. These are not isolated cases, because the endless camp clearances without any offer of alternative housing lead to deaths and humanitarian tragedies every year.


EveryOne Group met the parents of the babies and recorded their story in the hope that this umpteenth case of abuse the Roma people are subjected to does not go unnoticed.


Interview transcription:

We have lived here for a year without any trouble, we clean car windscreens for a living. That is our job, we are quiet people. Yes, they were armed, like a gang. I don't know why they came here. They could have just come and told us we couldn't stay here any more. My wife was very frightened. She was distraught, and the result was that we lost our baby. I may be poor, but I wanted that baby.


If the police hadn't turned up, things would have been all right. We had been at the factory for a year and nobody had ever said anything. But that day the police came. I don't know why. On February 25th a lot of policemen came to the factory in Via Fermo. They came early in the morning and forced all the families to remain inside, then they asked to see our papers. There were a lot of them, 30 or 20 policemen. They wanted to take my 4-year old daughter and put her in an institute until she was 18. I didn't want that to happen. I would rather have died than lost my child. Just imagine how a mother feels if she can't see her daughter again until she is 18. So I fled with my daughter, and I was three months pregnant. This episode led to me miscarrying.


I was terrified, and so was my sister. Then we fled to Rome and we were both ill. We had nowhere to sleep, for two days. Then we went back to Romania. I felt ill on the bus too. I spent two nights on the bus travelling back to Romania. Then in Romania I found out I'd lost the baby. If the police hadn't arrived, the pregnancy would have gone ahead. I'd even had a sonogram done. I'd done everything. We were going to call it Michele.


I collect a bit of money for my family here. I send 20 or 30 euros back to Romania to support them. Because our home country is not a good place, if it had been, I would have stayed there with my children. The police... and what happened... I was so scared. The stress... the fright. I slept out in the open for 2 nights, on the ground. I caught cold, I was in pain. I was very ill all the way to Romania. I was in hospital for three days in Romania. I'd suffered a miscarriage. The police knew she was expecting a baby, I told them so myself. I said: "My wife is expecting a baby and she sleeps in here. I have a place to sleep here with my wife". But they told me they didn't care, that we had to leave the factory. We had to leave and my wife miscarried. I'm really sorry.

On February 25th the police arrived and I was over two months' pregnant. There were a lot of police officers and I was very scared. I fell to the ground and I felt a pain inside my stomach. Then I fled to Rome because I had no place to sleep here as they had sent the police and local authorities, they don't help us here in Pesaro. When the police arrived here, they frightened me because they told me they would take my little girl away from me. When I heard that I fled with my daughter. I was expecting another baby. I had to sleep on the floor for days and I caught a cold. When I arrived in Romania I found out I had miscarried. I felt terrible. I felt a pain in my heart. I thought the baby was still alive, like my other two children. That's what I thought. And I thought that God had seen the harm those policemen had done to me.

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WANTED: Sinti and Roma Heroes and Role Models

We have no heroes, no role models, no "Davey Crockets" or "Abraham Lincolns". No "Martin Luther Kings"

The circumstances that forced the Sinti and Roma to withdraw from society and live secretive lives, robbed the future generations of their own cultural legacy. What hasn't been borrowed, or adapted from other cultures, has been made up or altered over the years leaving no tangible history of their own for the newer generations to pass on. The results have left most of us feeling disconnected and lost.

In order for our culture to really every become recognized by the rest of the world, don't we have to work at reconnecting the bridges that have been torn down or hidden over the years first? Don't we have to work from within before we can branch out.

Will there ever come a time where we have stories and heroes of our own?

I think we should start by creating personal role models and heroes. Personal heroes and role models can come from anywhere. We have the opportunity rght now to become leaders or find leaders in our own community or from the family histories of those in our culture. We need to make our own list and be able to articulate why the people are on that list. What did they do or say that kept them bigger than life in our eyes? What was our personal experience with them that earned them this place? Our list can include heroes we've never met, but studied through reading, research, or heard from our elders. It can include fathers and brothers, coaches and teachers, grandmothers and neighbors, soldiers and saints. They can be men or women, alive or dead, near or far. But they must be able to strike chords in our minds, hearts and bring focus to our culture. Then, we need to pass them on to others so they can gain from that knowledge too.

If you think about it, this is a very exciting time for Roma and Sinti. In a world, where everything has already been said, or done or written or created, we are just getting started. We have the opportunity to go down in history as leaders and pioneers! Each of us need to make one significant contribution because only through learning from the mistakes or accomplishments made by those in the past, can we every truly grow. And who knows, maybe one of you can become the futures Roma "Martin Luther King", or "Rosa Parks"!

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