On stolen babies and supremacy

If there is one of all the miserable stories about Roma life that drills right through to my soul, it is the story of the women who visited the normal maternity hospitals to give birth, only to find that they had been sterilized against their consent as they gave birth to their babies.

No, this is not a story of the 20th century eugenics craze in Scandinavia or some horror story from the Nazi past. It happened only a few years ago, in a newly democratic country, which should have known better.

On reporting the Roma

“Local residents up in arms at gypsy camp”. Thus began my first Roma story, a baby journalist reporting from a land of shrunken hopes and varied and variegated prejudices.

We didn’t mean it. We didn’t know any better. For us, these people were gypsies; people who seemed to delight in occupying the nearest piece of waste ground and burning tyres to their heart’s content. It wasn’t so long back that pubs had put out signs “No Blacks, Irish, Travellers or Dogs”. They’d managed to let the Irish and the Blacks in by then, and there were definitely a lot more mongrels hanging around their owners’ knees in the hope of a stale crisp or two. But the “travellers”? No, not welcome anywhere.

Nothing much changes. These past few months have felt like a wormhole into the past as I work with my colleagues to put paid to that old racism. The reason: Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to send Roma back from France to Romania and Bulgaria; swiftly followed by a huge debate that has raged on in all corners of Europe.

One thing has changed though. My total, appalling, ignorance.