Although discrimination against the Roma population in Hungary has a centuries-old tradition to look back to, it has been prohibited by the Constitution since 1949. As to the earlier times, historical records from the early 1400s document the arrival of the first migrant groups of Gypsies and their settlement on the periphery of towns in the territory of Hungary. Their numbers grew significantly in the regions under Turkish rule during the 16-17th centuries. Habsburg rule in the 18th century entailed constant attempts to control, discipline and forcibly assimilate the Gypsy population in Hungary which amounted to less than 100.000 by the early 19th century. The first statistical survey was conducted in 1893. It found that there were approximately 65 000 Gypsies living in the present territory of Hungary, the overwhelming majority settled in towns and villages. The economic prosperity of the pre-World War I years radically diminished demand in the traditional Gypsy trades but it also opened to Gypsies new forms of employment and sources of income. Their economic positions significantly deteriorated and their social exclusion intensified in the inter-war period. Several thousand Roma were deported to concentration camps or killed in the months of fascist rule in the last year of the second world-war.
The fact of the Roma holocaust remained unmentioned up to the 1970s when a proposal was put forward to erect a monument to the memory of the victims in the town of Székesfehérvár. The idea had to be abandoned due to protests of the local population. (A monument of the Roma holocaust was finally put up in the town of Nagykanizsa in 1991. Ever since then it has been the target of almost yearly attacks by neo-fascist groups.)
The first postwar years brought important democratic changes in Hungary. The land reform, however, which nationalised big landed estates and distributed farmland among the poor peasantry and agricultural day labourers, simply excluded the Roma even though their majority used to work in agriculture. Nobody thought such a clearly discriminatory measure needed at least some explanation. Survival for the Roma required them to find employment as day labourers in agriculture (at first, by peasants and later, by the cooperatives) or to migrate to the industrial centres where they could find work as unskilled workers in construction or the heavy industry. Because of the general housing shortage, the men lived in workers‘ hostels provided by the employing firm. They visited their families were left behind in the villages when they could afford the cost of railway transportation. In a poor country which financed forced industrialization by exploiting agriculture and the inherited infrastructure nobody deemed worth mentioning the unbearable poverty of the Roma who kept on living in colonies on the edge of villages. Following a long period of silence, the state party finally surveyed the state of the Gypsy population in 1961, when it had become clear that the Roma represented the last unexploited source of labour power that was constantly demanded by the expanding economy. The survey found that the majority of Hungarian Roma were living under subhuman conditions in the 2100 Gypsy colonies scattered all over the country. A program was launched to eliminate these colonies and improve the housing conditions of Gypsies. How slowly and half-heartedly the program was realised is indicated by the fact that ten years later still more than two-thirds of all Roma families lived in such colonies.
Nobody bothered to ask what the people affected thought about the project. „It certainly promised the Roma a chance to break out of their miserable ghettos and become just like anybody else,“ wrote Ottilia Solt in 1991. „But that chance evaporated. Masses of the Roma were initiated into the most depressing way of life Hungarian society had ever known, namely that of the commuting unskilled worker. They were driven or enticed away from their traditional colonies and allowed to move either into abandoned houses in atrophying villages or into newly constructed ghettos expressly built for them on the edges of villages. They had come nearer to the majority in spatial terms and the latter duly began to protect itself from this frightening, unfamiliar proximity. The public institutions of a mellowing dictatorship — the schools, local administration, work organisation and the police — were used as weapons in that defense. As a result, Roma communities had dissolved and came to constitute, instead, a huge, hostile coloured ethnic minority.“
If not earlier, at least after the first comprehensive sociological survey of 1971, directed by István Kemény, it had to become clear to every unbiased observer that the situation of the Roma in Hungary was intolerable and demanded the elaboration and implementation of a whole set of new policies. Since the state socialist government of that period refused to acknowledge the Roma as an ethnic minority and denied the existence of ethnic discrimination, it forcibly promoted the assimilation of the Roma and tended to blame them for their poverty. Evidence contradicting the official version as, for example, the results of the 1971 survey, could not be published. It was no chance that one of the first organisations set up by the democratic opposition of the late 1970s was the Fund for the Support of the Poor. It was launched by sociologists who had gathered their initial first-hand experiences of the systematically disadvantaged, hopeless situation of a significant proportion of the Roma population in the course of their fieldwork in that survey. The Fund could do no more than promote the research and documentation of the lives of the Roma in samizdat publications and distribute the meagre funds it had managed to collect from the few high-earning persons among its supporters. In the early 1980s, the Fund organised some more spectacular charity events — concerts and an art auction of works donated by contemporary artists — with the aim of directing public attention to the political responsibility for the lot of our fellow-citizens, to the hypocrisy of the authorities, the urgent need for a radical political intervention as well as for immediate financial help. In the years immediately preceding the overthrow of the state socialist regime, the „Roma question“ remained on the agenda of the opposition as an instance of the repression, social injustice, undemocratic and inhuman procedures of which it rightly accused the government, public administration, and the police.
For its part, the government made not only no effort to combat the anti-gypsy prejudices of the population, evident from the public opinion polls of the 1970-80s. The authorities even strengthened them, firstly, by sly suggestions of rampant Gypsy criminality and, secondly, by overadvertising eventual programs to diminish the unequality of chances of the Roma. As a consequence, the majority of Hungarians resented what they were led to perceive as the preferential treatment of Gypsies.
Ten years after the political changes the situation and prospects of the Roma population in Hungary have not improved. On the contrary, they seem to have turned significantly for the worse. The Roma are generally counted among the losers in the economic transformation of the country. Uncontestably, approximately 25% of the two million poor of Hungary are Roma, while they make up only 5% of the total population of around ten million. Moreover, according to reports of their own civil rights organisations as well as various human rights organisations, the Roma in Hungary are discriminated against not only by neighbours and employers, but also state or state-controlled institutions like public education, the national health service, the police, and the courts.
This may come as a surprise to all those who rely only on information supplied by government sources. These do not deny the catastrophic poverty of the Roma population but insinuate that it is the unwillingness or inability of the Roma to accept the values and norms of mainstream society that is mainly responsible for their dire state and prospects. (The present Prime Minister has not revised or rejected the outrageous comments of his cabinet members on the action of the Roma in Strasbourg. He merely added an emphatic remark in a statement on public radio, suggesting that the only option for the Roma in Hungary was to finally set themselves to study and work.) Concerning respect for the human rights of the Roma, official reports proudly emphasise the exemplary institution of minority self-governments and a parliamentary ombudsman for national and ethnic minority rights in Hungary and keep repeating impressive figures indicating the amount of state budget expenditures earmarked for Roma support programs.
Fortunately, there are available statistics and research results that allow us to check the credibility of these widely divergent representations.
The most revealing data concern unemployment. While in 1971 over 85% of Roma males aged 15-59 and 30% of Roma females aged 15-54 had been regularly employed and had earned incomes (the corresponding figures in the total population were 87 and 64%, resp.), from the late 1980s onwards, they were systematically pushed out of the labour market. This trend resulted by 1993 in shockingly high unemployment figures for the Roma. The analysis of the employment data by Gábor Kertesi clearly proved that less than half of the Roma unemployment rate could be accounted for by „hard“ factors like the lower educational level, disadvantageous territorial and sectoral distribution of Roma labour power. The rest was due to ethnic discrimination by employers. This finding was indirectly confirmed in an analysis of wage differences among the employed where Kertesi found that hard factors explained less than two-thirds of wage inequality between Roma and other Hungarian citizens. The rest could only be attributed to ethnic discrimination.
Another area where ethnic discrimination of the Roma is undeniable and outrageous is public education where there is a manifest trend to segregate Roma children and to block their educational careers. Roma children are relayed to special education classes for retarded children or to segregated classes supposedly intended to help them work off their alleged cultural/civilizational lag as compared to ethnic Hungarians. Segregation sometimes assumes the traits of apartheid proper when, for example, the Roma classes are not allowed to use the gym in their school. While the government boasts of the extra funds it distributes to municipal governments for the establishment of Roma classes at the elementary schools, the use of these funds will never be controlled and Roma school classes work under the worst conditions with badly paid staff that is unsuited to the task. In a large northeastern county of Hungary over 90% of Roma children are to be found in such special education classes. In this way, the educational authorities institutionally guarantee that the overwhelming majority of Roma children will be refused the chance to enter secondary education. No wonder that, in 1993, only 6% of Roma 16-year-olds attended secondary school, while the corresponding rate among the non-Roma was 60%.
The system of vocational training has also profoundly changed in the past ten years. Schools which offer marketable skills cannot guarantee shop-floor training for their students as they used to when they had permanent contracts with the state enterprises for which they trained skilled workers. Now the parents are expected to negotiate with local masters and pay for a training job for their children. Poor families and families without a good social network are forced to give up hope of seeing their children earning their living as skilled workers. Since there is no demand for unskilled labour any more, the unemployment rate among the 15-18-year-old Roma is particularly high.
Another area of racial discrimination with grave consequences for the Roma population as well as the functioning of the law enforcement system of Hungary is manifest in what could only be described as the criminalisation of the Roma. National and local politicians and the media have been covertly suggesting or openly claiming that the main problem with the Roma population is its criminal behaviour which make it difficult for mainstream society to integrate them on an equal basis and for the „honest minority“ among the Roma to be treated as it deserves. This discourse has produced two tangible consequences. Firstly, the police try to keep the Roma under constant surveillance, look for perpetrators in their circles and arrest them on the slightest suspicion. Thus the rate of successfully discovered, investigated crimes is much higher in their cases than among the majority population. As a consequence, prejudice functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy: the particular attention of the police seems to prove the assumed higher criminality rate among the Roma than, say, among ethnic Hungarians with comparable social status. Thus it can happen that approximately half of the prison inmates in Hungary are Roma. Secondly, the alleged threat of Roma criminality lends persuasive power to the adherents of law and order and to demagoguery demanding the restriction of criminals‘ human rights in the interests of the moral majority.
Residential segregation is generally a more or less spontaneous process that is difficult to counteract. In the case of the Roma in Hungary this process is deliberately promoted by municipal authorities that work to preserve the existing segregated Roma residential areas or to create new ones or, even better, to drive the Roma away from their territories. Thus it comes as no surprise that more than 15% of the Roma population of Hungary still live in segregated colonies at the edge of a town or village, and that this rate is over 30% in the economically depressed Northern region. A relatively recent trend is the appearance of "rural ghettos". These are small villages with less than 1000 inhabitants, cut off from economic and civilizational circuits, dead-ends abandoned by the more prosperous and mobile where only the Roma remain with no actual or prospective employment or other source of income.
The fate of the seven Hungarian Roma families that are waiting now for the French immigration authorities and the Strasbourg Human Rights Court to decide on their case, represents a clear-cut instance of forced segregation, prompted by racist discrimination and achieved by violence and illegal means.
They come from a most prosperous, in fact, booming region of Hungary. In the 1980s the municipality of the town of Székesfehérvár sold them houses in the nearby village of Zámoly. Here they had been living for more than a decade when a heavy storm in October 1997 severely damaged their houses and made them seek shelter in the community house of the village. The mayor of the village wasted no time and immediately had the damaged houses demolished - without consulting or receiving the consent of the owners. In one stroke he thus managed to rob them of their most valuable property and make them homeless and dependent on the goodwill of the local administration. They had no choice but to stay on in the community house. Without offering any help to find an acceptable solution, the village council (called local self-government since 1990) decided that the families were to leave the community house by July next year.
At this point the National Gypsy Self-Government stepped in to assume the role of the mediator in a situation of what they perceived as a "conflict". This organisation is the official representative of Hungary's Roma population, always loyal to the powers that be which, in exchange for that loyalty, regularly cover up the dubious election procedures and financial affairs of the organisation. Instead of demanding the restitution of, or compensation for, the property of which the Roma families in Zámoly had been illegally deprived, the President of the National Gypsy Self-Govenment offered to buy them building lots where they could construct their new homes. Apart from the publicity it had created for its good intentions, the organisation achieved nothing. As it turned out, there were no available building lots in the village of Zámoly. More precisely, as soon as the National Gypsy Self-Government voiced its intention to acquire a particular plot of land in the village, its representatives were told that the building lot in question had just been bought by one of the villagers. The mayor declared that there was no place for these families in the village and, consequently, he would try, with all his might, to find them houses somewhere else.
One promise followed another without any solution in view. The homeless were forced to stay another year in the community house - under worsening conditions, since the mayor had turned off water, gas and electricity in the house when he had learned that its temporary inhabitants could not pay the bills. Almost a year after the storm, the National Gypsy Self-Government did buy a building site in the village - a month later than the first deadline set for the families to leave the community house. However, the villagers' protests made the National Gypsy Self-Government withdraw and cautiously refrain from starting construction. Another year was wasted and when it became evident that the 50 homeless persons would be evicted from the community house on July 31, 1999, the National Gypsy Self-Government built them temporary wooden barracks on the previously acquired lot. The families duly moved in and faced the hostility of the village, threats and repeated attacks by groups of racist young men from the wider neighbourhood. A fortnight after they had moved into the barracks, a clash with the attackers resulted in the mortal injury of one of the attackers. The Roma families fled and the villagers lost no time to put fire to the wooden barracks.
The events of Zámoly were regularly reported by the media; apart from the extreme right press, the most biased reports, that mixed information with rumour and insinuation, were presented to the listeners and viewers of what is called public broadcasting in Hungary. As a result of this publicity, a private company offered the Roma free shelter for the winter in the unfurnished rooms of a villa in Buda. This humanitarian action was, at least partly, motivated by the company's hope that the next door neighborhood of the Roma would finally persuade the old lady who still owned one apartment in the house to move out and sell her part of the estate to the firm. If so, the plan misfired for the lady had found her new neighbours quite agreeable.
After all these vicissitudes the homeless Roma applied to the Parliamentary Ombudsman for Minority Rights who then examined their case and offically decreed that the mayor of Zámoly had acted against the law. The ombudsman's statement had no tangible consequences.
In the spring of 2000, the seven families moved, with the help of relatives, into a house in the village of Csór. The villagers immediately began to accuse them for various robberies that had allegedly taken place in the village since their arrival. Their house became again the target of aggressive racists who regularly broke the windowpanes and painted swastikas on the walls.
It was at the end of this chain of events that József Krasznai, the head of the Fejér county unit of an independent Roma civil rights organisation (Roma Parliament) persuaded the persecuted people to go with him to Strasbourg and sue the Hungarian government.
In whatever way the judges in Strasbourg will decide in this case, we must ask ourselves what has gone wrong with the rule of law in Hungary, if racial discrimination against Hungarian citizens can go on for years without fear of legal punishment. Negative discrimination of individuals or groups on account of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation is after all expressly forbidden not only by dozens of international agreements of which the Hungarian state is among the signatories, but also by our own Constitution, the Labour Code, the Penal Code, the Civil Code and several laws, among them the law on public education. These principles, however, are rarely ever invoked in the courts where judges prefer to apply only lower level laws and legal regulations in their practice. Various NGOs keep demanding that a specific bill on the prohibition of discrimination should be passed which would also specify the appropriate sanctions for by breaking the law. The government finds this unnecessary and the Minister of Justice keeps repeating that the existent laws are sufficient to treat this problem. At the same time, Parliament continues approving new laws (on the police, on the eviction of squatters, etc.) which implicitly target the Roma population again.
Beginning in the first week of August, a discussion series on the „Roma question“ has been started in a Hungarian liberal literary-political weekly. Most of the discussants agree that what we are facing here is, in fact, a „Hungarian question“, the question of preserving human rights, democracy and an equal respect for the human dignity of all in our country. Racists do not come forward in this discussion. They merely act and we all suffer the consequences.