Finding Common Ground Key to Reversing Anti-Roma Sentiment, Panelists Say

Finding common ground and refusing to accept hate speech and stereotypes would help reverse anti-Roma sentiment in Hungary, panelists concluded at the Nov. 5 discussion “Hate Crimes and Roma: Recent Lessons from Hungary” at CEU, sponsored by the Office of the President and Rector.

“We want to support efforts to find common ground, to live together in peace and respect, despite our differences,” said Ellen Hume, Annenberg Fellow in Civic Media at the Center for Media and Communication Studies at CEU’s School of Public Policy and cofounder of nalunknem.org.

Hume announced the launch of the website for nalunknem.org, an initiative in Hungary parallel to the Not In Our Town movement in the U.S., saying the goal of the organization and its website is “to link together people we found are working sometimes in isolation and in danger to build a more peaceful and tolerant Hungary.”

The initiative follows a series of violent acts against Roma in the past two decades in Hungary. In 2008 and 2009, six people were killed and five injured in a year-long spree of violence, including a father and his four-year-old son who were shot dead as they tried to flee their home as it burned down. Another woman was shot dead in her sleep. Four men were found guilty in the case in a verdict issued in August 2013. Three received life sentences, and the fourth received 13 years in prison for collusion.

Although the verdict was welcomed by Amnesty International and activists, it was also widely criticized by the same groups for failing to address the issue of hate crime. Two short films from the nalunknem.org website were shown at the CEU event featuring witness testimony describing the horrific violence in the most brutal of the serial killings, in Tatarszentgyorgy. The films, entitled “Their Skin Was Their Only Sin,” were directed by Andras Vagvolgyi, a Hungarian journalist and filmmaker who participated in the CEU discussion. He holds a law degree and blogged about the year-long trial. Click here for these videos and more.

The case and its verdict were “a failed opportunity to lance the boil of racism in Hungary,” said Nick Thorpe, a BBC journalist and longtime resident of Budapest who moderated the panel. “The motives were not sufficiently examined, either by the police investigating, the authorities placing the charges, or the judges.”

Aladar Horvath, former member of Parliament and founder of the Roma Civil Rights Movement of Hungary, outlined the key questions for the Roma community and its situation at the CEU forum.

“Those died in Tatarszentgyorgy because they are not considered Hungarians,” Horvath said. “Roma Hungarians are not considered Hungarians. My question is, who stands to gain by isolating us from mainstream society, by seeing us as an exotic Oriental nation or as criminals and pariahs and thus estrange us from society? I’m interested to know the role of economic selfishness in fomenting ethnic hatred. Why can’t the media be prevented from inflaming anti-Roma passions? I want to know how the Roma who are outcast can protect themselves from institutionalized racism by the state.”

While Hungary has legislation against hate crimes, authorities often apply a double standard in its use, according to Stefania Kapronczay, executive director of the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, known as TASZ.

“Police are very able and eager to find hate crimes when people of Roma background commit crimes against non-Roma Hungarians,” and reluctant to classify racist violence against Roma as hate crimes, she said at the forum. In 2009, not long after the serial killings, men of Roma origin were accused of hate crimes after attacking a car driving through a Roma neighborhood in Sajobabony following an incident between members of right-wing groups and Roma citizens the previous day. Eight men were sentenced to a combined 35 years in the case. By contrast, during the series of killings in 2008-2009, “only after the eighth attack and fourth murder did the police establish a link and identify them as hate crimes.”

The final verdict in the serial killings will only be handed down in 2014 by an appeals court. Filmmaker Vagvolgyi said he unfortunately expects “political motivation” to influence the proceedings since it is an election year.

Oana Mihalache, a student in CEU’s Master of Laws in Human Rights program in the Department of Legal Studies as well as an Open Society Justice Initiative Fellow, spoke about initiatives at her former employer, Romani CRISS, a non-governmental organization in her native Romania, where anti-Roma sentiment is also a serious issue. Romani CRISS took action after an extremist organization began offering money to Roma women to undergo voluntary sterilization, joining forces with an NGO working to combat anti-Semitism, since the same extremist organization had made Holocaust denial statements.

“It showed the importance of organizations joining forces to combat this,” which amounted to incitement to hatred, she said.

"Cooperation is crucial,” concurred Kapronczay. “But what we really should learn is to find a language that reaches out to people we don’t normally reach out to.”

Hume concluded the discussion by agreeing with Kapronczay, since nalunknem.org urges and provides ideas on how site visitors can get involved in their own communities. She quoted Vaclav Havel to observe that even small positive actions by ordinary citizens can add up: “We did what we could. When we did what we could, we found we could do more. So we did more.”