Europe's marginalised Roma people hit hard by coronavirus

Pandemic has increased deprivation and stigmatisation of continent’s largest minority.

Shaun Walker in Budapest

Europe’s largest minority, the Roma people, are being particularly hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic in many countries, because they face a combination of health risks, economic deprivation and increased stigmatisation.

Around 80% of Europe’s 10 million Roma live in densely populated neighbourhoods and overcrowded houses, and many do not have access to running water. This means the basic distancing and sanitary measures required to combat the spread of the virus are more difficult. In some countries this has already led to scapegoating of Roma communities as potential illness hotspots.

“This disaster will not only affect the Roma but also mainstream societies, economies, and politics, and heighten inter-ethnic conflict to a level not seen in the last three decades,” according to a recent report by the Open Society Foundations on the impact of coronavirus on Roma in six countries with sizeable communities: Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Slovakia and Spain.

Roma neighbourhoods in Bulgaria and Slovakia have been cordoned off amid fears of the virus spreading. Police checkpoints were introduced outside two large neighbourhoods in Sofia, and people were only allowed to leave the area if they could show a work contract or prove another urgent reason for doing so.

“I would say that coercion is needed in certain situations there, because we are obliged to protect the rest of the population,” Bulgaria’s interior minister, Mladen Marinov, said when the measures were introduced in March. The controls on the Sofia neighbourhoods were lifted in late April, but on Monday a number of streets in the Roma neighbourhood of the town of Sliven were blockaded, after a sharp rise in coronavirus cases there.

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In Slovakia, five Roma settlements were put under quarantine in early April in a move that rights activists decried as discriminatory. Four of the settlements have since had the quarantine lifted.

“Even if there was some justification for concern, the security measures have not been followed up by proper health measures and social aid measures. A lot of people were left without water and medication,” said Zeljko Jovanovic, the head of the Open Society Roma initiatives and one of the authors of the report.

Elana Resnick, an anthropologist specialising in Bulgaria’s Roma community, said pointing the finger at Roma people was the latest example in a long history of minorities being blamed for spreading disease, and of the Roma being blamed for state failures. “The idea of who is a likely vector of contagion is racialised, and the blame is shifted from state structural issues to the people themselves, saying ‘these people aren’t clean’,” she said.

Many Roma people work in grey market day-to-day jobs, meaning they were laid off as the pandemic hit, and may not be eligible for state compensation schemes. Others returned to central and eastern European countries from jobs in western Europe at the start of the pandemic, often because their income sources had dried up because work was cancelled. Back home, they often have no health insurance and few safety nets.

Many families either have no internet connection at home, or do not have enough devices for all children in the household, which makes distance learning difficult.

“Coronavirus is changing these conditions from bad to a catastrophe,” said Jovanovic.

Populist politicians have targeted Roma communities across Europe in recent years. A far-right party in Slovakia launched uniformed patrols on trains to seek out “gypsy criminality”, and far-right militias in Ukraine have carried out numerous attacks on Roma settlements. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, appeared to use the country’s Roma community as a scapegoat in a campaign earlier this year.

A Hungarian court ruled last year that school segregation in the town of Gyöngyöspata had harmed Roma children, and awarded 60 claimants a combined total of around 100m forint (£250,000) in damages. Orbán said the government would refuse to pay, and promised a nationwide consultation on whether it should comply with the ruling.

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“It’s really tense. We feel threatened,” said Géza Csemer, the head of the local Roma community body in Gyöngyöspata, in an interview in February, before the introduction of coronavirus restrictions. Much of the community in the town, about 50 miles from Budapest, lives in an area of ramshackle bungalows beyond a foul-smelling stream where the sewage from the rest of the town is pumped.

Many communities in Hungary and across the region have similarly segregated living conditions as well as difficulties accessing quality education and the labour market. “What happens at school leads to inferiority complexes as adults and then the whole cycle continues,” said Csemer.

Coronavirus threatens to aggravate all of the pre-existing problems of poor quality housing, low economic opportunities, associated health problems and ensuing discrimination.

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There are, however, some cases of people challenging the stereotypes. In Bulgaria, Maj Gen Ventsislav Mutafchiyski, who is running the state’s coronavirus response, shut down a question about how many Roma people were infected with the virus by asking the journalist which century they were living in.

Maya Grekova, a sociology professor at Sofia University, said there are also some signs that the pandemic has made authorities realise that Roma problems cannot be simply ignored.

“State institutions started to realise that they need to help these people, not only to blame them. Institutions don’t like to go to Roma neighbourhoods and work with people there, but now maybe some of them understand it’s their obligation,” she said.

Additional reporting by Eszter Neuberger