It's not good. The New York Times recently reported on Slovakia's "painful struggle for [Roma]
integration that some here say echoes that of the United States more
than a half-century ago":
“The situation in Slovakia now is exactly the same as it was in the United States,” said Peter Pollak, a Roma member of Parliament and the government’s plenipotentiary for Roma communities, who recently visited the United States to learn about its battles over segregated schooling and other entrenched barriers to equality.
In a continent faced with an economic crisis, soaring unemployment and bursts of nationalist populism, the elementary school here in eastern Slovakia is a microcosm of one of Europe’s biggest challenges: how to keep old demons of ethnic scapegoating at bay and somehow bring its most disadvantaged and fastest growing minority into the mainstream.Many Europeans associate Roma with crime, particularly well-organized gangs of young Roma pickpockets who prey on local residents and tourists alike in the Continent’s wealthier cities.
The flag of the Roma Descendants of medieval migrants who arrived in Europe from India more than a millennium ago, Roma, also known as Gypsies, now account for around 10 percent of Slovakia’s population and a substantial minority in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, the Czech Republic and Macedonia. There are also Roma communities scattered across Western Europe.In all these places, they outpace all other groups in unemployment, illiteracy and other indicators of deprivation and as targets for abuse and sometimes violent attack.
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| Roma populations in Europe |
