Ida Scharla Løjmand – Pike & Hurricane

Leaders of today: Hannah Stanton on sustainable development and the power of youth

Ida Scharla Løjmand — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 23:05:33 +0000

In November, the Association of Foreign Affairs at Malmö University had the pleasure of hosting a lecture with Hannah Stanton, programme director of TheGoals.org, an online learning platform for creating awareness of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s).

Hannah Stanton, 2016

Hannah Stanton has previously led the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) delegation to the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women and the Agenda 2030 negotiations. Currently, she focuses on her work in the UN Major Group for Children and Youth and as director of TheGoals.org.

TheGoals.org is an interactive web app created to educate young people in the age of 14 to 30 years about the SDG’s. The aim is to inspire the users to take action against climate change, gender inequality, and hunger or in other ways work to fulfill UN’s 17 SDG’s. The philosophy of TheGoals.org is that education can appear in various forms and forums different from traditional school. And according to Hannah Stanton, such a platform connects young people pursuing a more sustainable world and shapes the future decisionmakers.

A world of unlocked potential

Hannah Stanton gained her own leadership skills and experience working with young people through the girl scout movement. She has attended various international events, meeting scouts from all over the world and she strongly believes the young generation has the power to push for a more sustainable world.

The sustainable development goals projected on the UN headquarters, New York 2015

One may wonder what a teenager can do to stop climate change or what difference a student from the far North can make for women in Zambia. When asked why it even matters to involve young people who are not influential decision-makers, Hannah Stanton answers resolutely:

“The unlocked youth potential is the biggest driving force of making a change. We are dealing with the most growing generation – look at a country like Jordan where 65 percent of the population are under 30. Not using this group would be a huge loss. Youth is often disregarded and not included. If we can affect this, the decision-makers cannot neglect the youth anymore.”

She also stresses the importance of influencing the young generation from the beginning:

“Young people are still learning and if we can shape their behavior to be sustainable from the start they do not have to relearn anything. The older people, including ourselves, have to learn a lot of new things. If we give the young people a good start, they can be responsible adults from the beginning.”

Hannah Stanton at Malmö University 2017

Different kinds of change

So according to Hannah Stanton, we are dealing with a huge generation – as more than half of the world’s 7 billion population is under 30 years – of potential to change, just waiting to be realised. And even though the background and resources of those young people vary, she believes that the young generation can make much more of a difference than some people might assume.

“What exactly young people can do depends on where they come from and what kind of agency they have,” she says and brings up an example from her work as UN Major Group for Children and Youth Global Focal Point for SDG 14 (Conservation and sustainable use of the oceans):

“Look at the small island states – or large ocean states as I think they should be called – for example. Here we need to bridge the gap of understanding between young people in the islands and in other landlocked countries. Government indicators may not be the best tool for this purpose. The young people in landlocked countries need to understand how our consumption behaviours and climate change impact put these islands at risk, and how we can change and stop that to save our ocean and the islands.”

Young participants at the UN Ocean Conference, June 2017

She admits that there is a difference between the youth and the older decision-makers who set the indicators for sustainable development. However, according to Hannah Stanton, this is not an obstacle for younger people to contribute to change.

“For me, the focus here is understanding the global context and what I can contribute with and not so much thinking ‘I need to ensure sustainable fisheries in the small island states’,” she says and turns her eyes towards the ceiling with a grimace. “I mean, that can be overwhelming or just too far from home for some. Now, if you are into marine biology or work in an environmental group, that will be closer to home and will be your focus. But for me, at this stage the most important part is that young people globally understand the significant impact our lives and lifestyles have on the ocean and the significant impact the ocean has and will have on our lives.”

So, what should the young people do once they achieve this understanding? According to Hannah Stanton, this is again a matter of context.

“In this part of the world [the West/Nordic countries, ed.], we must change our consumption patterns and transport manners and lead by example. I think those tasks are the easiest for us to fulfill, for instance here in Malmö,” she says. “For other parts of the world, I think the issue is to not develop like a developed country but to be sustainable from the beginning and not fall into the trap of seeing owning 50 types of the latest car model as a status symbol. To make sure to recycle, not burn the plastic, and so on.”

Hopes to inspire

To think less materialistically seems easy for a well-educated woman living in Sweden, one of the world’s most affluent and gender equal countries. Young people from a poor country, who compare their life to the ideal presented in the media, might find it easier to relate to the strive for owning a car than for conserving the oceans. But this manner of thinking is also a thing Hannah Stanton aims to address with TheGoals.org.

Hannah Stanton, 2016

“We are hoping that this materialistic aspiration is just not encouraged by the way we educate [on TheGoals.org, ed.], for example by providing realisations like that you need to wear a piece of clothing 80 times in order for it to be sustainable,” she explains. “If we succeed, we will have the first sustainable generation. And I hope – well, i am sure – that we can do that.”

The belief in the power of the youth is crystal clear when Hannah Stanton talks. Despite global differences, she firmly maintains her trust in the people’s ability to make a change already while they are young.

“I hate – with passion – the notion of ‘leaders of tomorrow’,” she says. “We are all leaders of our lives today. The choice I make today has an impact today and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and so on. I am not the leader of tomorrow, I am very much the leader of today.”

By Ida Scharla Løjmand

Photo Credit:

SDG Media Zone by United Nations Photo, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Hannah Stanton by United Nations Development Programme, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

UN Headquarters by United Nations Photo, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

UN Ocean Conference by United Nations Photo, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Hannah Stanton by by United Nations Development Programme, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Between waters: the dilemma of the Nicaragua Canal

Ida Scharla Løjmand — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 22:47:24 +0000

On June 14, 2013, the Nicaraguan government passed a law enabling the construction of a big interoceanic canal across the country. In August next year, visions of an interoceanic canal through the Central American country between the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean might become reality. The hope is that the forthcoming waterway will bring development and prosperity to Nicaragua that is one of the least developed in Latin America, according to the World Bank.

But the canal project does not only catalyse dreams of development. For some people living on the land intended to be used for the canal, the government’s plans constitute a threat to their homes and lifestyle. This is the case for the indigenous Rama people and the afro-descendant Creole people inhabiting Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast.

The red line shows the suggestion for the canal route through Nicaragua. The picture is a reconstruction based on the project plan from HKND Group. Original map by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency

The Rama and Creole people traditionally live of fishing and small-scale agriculture in the jungle and to them their way of living is not only a tradition on the verge of vanishing into oblivion. It is also a way of co-existing with nature without harming one’s environment.

One year ago I visited a number of communities in the Rama and Creole Territory and several of the inhabitants emphasised the land’s importance for their lifestyle.

“Without our land, we are nothing”

According to Hilario McRae, a member of the local government in the Rama community of Indian River, the indigenous people are “nothing without Mother Earth”. He argues for the right of his people to their territory because the Ramas live from the forest.

“The reserve [the Indio-Maíz Reserve located in the Rama territory, ed.] is like a refrigerator to us,” he told me when I interviewed him last year about the arguments for protecting the Ramas’ land. “If we want to eat wild pig, we go hunting. If we want fish, we fish in the river. And without the forest, we will not have water. If you cut down the woods, the river will dry out. What carries the water is the roots of the trees. This is why we will not destroy the forest. This is why we call this Mother Earth – without our land and forests, we are nothing.”

Rama people on the Río Indio (Indian River), a part of their legally granted territory that is now threatened by the canal project. Photo: Ida Scharla Løjmand

And the threat of losing their land and culture to the international development project is not the only problem for the Ramas and Creoles. Civil society organisations, such as Amnesty International and the Nicaraguan NGO Fundación del Río, have criticised the Nicaraguan government for permitting the Chinese company HKND Group to construct the canal without the consent from the peoples who will lose their land to the project.

However, HKND Group states its commitment to sustainable development of the environment and Nicaraguan society in the company’s first CSR report. The corporation also claims to have consulted Ramas and Creoles back in 2014 to inform them about the canal’s impact on their land. According to HKND Group, the participants of these meetings were hopeful to see the canal constructed within short time.

The “century-old dream” of development

The first idea of constructing a waterway through Central America emerged already in the 19th century but as we know today, that route ended up going through Panama.

According to HKND Group, the interoceanic canal project is a “a century-old dream” coming true for Nicaragua. HKND Group also points out that global trends call for the construction of another canal. These are trends like increased global maritime trade, a rising global growth rate powered by new technology and emerging businesses, and shifting global trade patterns with more contribution from new markets in Africa and Latin America.

Moreover, HKND Group does not only consider the project having “profound global significance” but also being a way of bringing about economic growth and social development in Nicaragua and thus obtaining “win-win results”.

Rama house in the Indian River community. Photo: Ida Scharla Løjmand

Clash of interests

But the Rama way of living does not exactly harmonise with HKND Group’s visions about global trade and growth rates. And the case of the Nicaragua Canal reflects the challenge of balancing the interests of local communities with those of the rest of the country – and of the world.

This balance is not always easy to find. On one hand, the Ramas and Creoles and several human rights and environmental organisations are fighting to bring attention to the lack of respect to the indigenous and ethnic peoples’ land rights. On the other, a 2016 poll from the Nicaraguan public opinion research center M&R Consultores show that a majority of the Nicaraguans support the interoceanic canal.

Even inside the Rama and Creole Territory, some voices are protesting against the canal and some are condemning the opponents at the same time. Sometimes to an extent where it is hard to figure out who is arguing for what. Before my first visit in the Rama and Creole Territory last year, I was advised to not talk about the canal project for the sake of my own security.

In January 2016, two press releases from the Rama-Kriol Territorial Government (GTR-K) were issued – two completely different statements from what appeared to be the same messenger. The first states that Nicaraguan state officials tried to pressure the Ramas and Creoles to consent to the construction of the canal in the territory but denied them access to the full text of the supposed agreement. The other press release argues that free, prior and informed consent has been obtained from all nine communities of the Rama and Creole Territory “in accordance with the norms of GTR-K and respecting the traditions and customs of the indigenous Rama people and the afro-descendent Creoles.”

This message – signed and stamped by Hector Thomas McRea, the president of the Territorial Government – states that the previous press release is false and accuses canal opponents for abusing the membership of Territorial Government to publish “unauthorized communications”.

Whether the canal construction will actually begin is yet to be revealed in August next year.

Meanwhile, the dispute between advocates and opponents of the international mega-project will most likely go on. The question is how many voices will be overheard when globalisation arrives with promises of economic development.

By Ida Scharla Løjmand

Photo Credits:

Map: U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, public domain

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Ashin Wirathu: One Man Triggering Ethnic Conflict

Ida Scharla Løjmand — Sun, 29 Oct 2017 13:10:04 +0000

The violence against Myanmar’s Rohingyas is nothing new. For more than three years, the media has reported about attacks and hate speech against the Muslim minority and criticized Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the National League for Democracy and Nobel Peace Prize-winner, for her silence on what the UN has deemed “the fastest-growing refugee emergency in the world today”.

However, Aung San Suu Kyi is not the only leader the world should look at in connection with the rohingya ethnic cleansing in Myanmar – even since 2014, international media have had their eyes on the Buddhist monk Ashin Wirathu from Mandalay, who has been described by, for instance, The Guardian and Time as a driving force of the violence against Myanmar’s Rohingyas.

He leads a monastery in Mandalay, the second-largest city in Myanmar and the home of more than 2500 Buddhist monks. Already in 2014, AJ+ explained how Wirathu preaches hatred against the Muslims in Myanmar and how his popularity increased along with his radicalism.

Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Photo: Jordi Bernabeu Farrús

“Protecting” his country

Wirathu himself claims to merely protect his country.

“I am defending my loved one,” he said in an article from The Guardian in May this year. ”Like you would defend your loved one. I am only warning people about Muslims. Consider it like if you had a dog, that would bark at strangers coming to your house – it is to warn you. I am like that dog. I bark.”

And he barks loudly. A quick google-search on his name generates loads of news articles connecting him to the violence against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

However, there are also voices claiming that these depictions of him are false. A website supporting his anti-Muslim 969 Movement – however, admitting to have no official connection to Ashin Wirathu or the Movement itself – rejects Time Magazine’s description of Wirathu as “the face of Buddhist terror” and describes him as treating “all people with fairness” and as someone who has started “campaigns to support Buddhists in his country and around the globe.”

The power of social media

On Facebook, several pages connected to Ashin Wirathu appears when one types in his name. Which one is his official site is hard to tell but several are fairly popular and in favor of the openly anti-Muslim monk. One page shares, for instance, articles criticizing the Western media’s discourse on him and the violence in Myanmar. The page has 9345 likes and 9525 followers. Another one with the name Wira Thu has even more followers; 413,419,and has been active as recently as this September. Even for readers who cannot read Burmese, pictures with the text “No Rohingya in Myanmar” speak for themselves.

So, even if Wirathu denies encouraging the violence against the Rohingyas, he is clearly an influential leader, who openly accuses the Muslim population of Myanmar of imposing a threat to the country and aiming to “build up an islamic state.”

Even though only 5 percent of Myanmar’s 54 million people are Muslim, people listen to Wirathu.

In a video reportage from AJ+, another Buddhist monk admits that “every race has good and bad people. Those who use violence and those who don’t.” However, he adds: “But Muslims are mostly violent.”

Like many others, he believes that Wirathu will protect Myanmar from the Muslims.

However, there are also Buddhist who do not support Wirathu’s aggressive rhetorics. Another monk from Mandalay takes his distance from the so-called “the face of Buddhist terror” but he is still worried what Wirathu and other people’s hate speech against Muslims in Myanmar can lead to: “If there are those who spread rumours, those of unsound minds would be inspired to act rash without thinking,” he explains to AJ+.

But despite this critique, Wirathu and his hateful words apparently hold a big group of monks and other Buddhists in a tight grip consequently inflaming the ethnic conflict in Myanmar.

By Ida Scharla Løjmand

Photo Credit:

AK Rockefeller, CC BY-SA 2.0

Jordi Bernabeu Farrús, CC BY 2.0

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Food Waste Reveals the Ugly Side of Consumerism

Ida Scharla Løjmand — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 17:05:50 +0000

About one month ago, I found myself for the first time with my hands deep in a smelly, dark dumpster looking for potential ingredients for my next dinner. Not because I’m forced to or because I enjoy the smell of garbage, I was curious to see how much food a regular Swedish supermarket tosses after closing time. There was a lot. A lot more than what seemed reasonable.

Considering that 795 million people around the world go to bed hungry, and that food production demands a massive use of resources, tossing food seems not only weird and wasteful but also dangerous for the climate.

Food waste is a global problem, not only present in wealthy Western countries but also nations like China, India and other countries where parts of the population suffer from hunger.

In 2011, a report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimated that “roughly one-third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally, which amounts to about 1.3 billion tons per year.”

However, the reasons for food waste are various and depend on the country’s economic status.
According to the FAO report, low-income countries mainly throw away food early in the production due to premature harvesting, lack of facilities to preserve the fresh food or too few places with storage and sales opportunities

In industrialized countries, a lot of food is wasted because the production exceeds the demand and in high- and medium-income countries, most waste happens at the consumption stage where food is simply tossed even if it is still edible. The food can be discarded by suppliers or consumers because it does not meet certain aesthetic standards. Also, the demand for a varied assortment of food leads retail chains to buy more than what they can sell.

“Retail stores need to order a variety of food types and brands from the same manufacturer to get beneficial prices […] A wide range of products does, however, increase the likelihood of some of them reaching their “sell-by” date before being sold, and thereby wasted,” the FAO report states.

It adds that “at the consumer level, insufficient purchase planning and expiring ‘best-before-dates’ also cause large amounts of waste, in combination with the careless attitude of those consumers who can afford to waste food.”

Yes. In high-income countries, we can afford to waste food. Consumers – and thereby supermarkets – can reject groceries because they are too crooked or too small.

The FAO report describes how Tristram Stuart, a British anti-food waste campaigner, visited a carrot farm in Yorkshire that sent 25-30 percent of the production to feed livestock just because they didn’t meet the retail chains’ aesthetic demands:

“In the packing house, all carrots passed through photographic sensor machines, searching for aesthetic defects. Carrots that were not bright orange, had…[a] blemish or were broken were swept off.”

Sounds weird? It definitely is. But it is also the simple consequence of consumerism. It is the belief that consuming more is economically beneficial for society. But this increases the risk of overproduction and makes it easier for us, the consumers, to be picky with our grocery shopping.

As Tristram Stuart puts it: “There is an enormous buffer in the West between us and hunger.”

Tristram Stuart. Photo from the “Feeding 5k” campaign.

Not only is this a Western problem, but the environmental impact of food waste affects both rich and poor countries. Overproduction of food affects the world’s CO2 emissions.

In another document on “Food wastage footprint & Climate Change”, FAO writes that “if food wastage were a country, it would be the third largest emitting country in the world.”

Landfills produce methane that causes global warming at a higher rate than carbon emissions. In landfills, perfectly edible, though aesthetically imperfect, food spoils and warms the planet.

The world’s blue water footprint – water used for agriculture, industry and domestic use – also increases when we waste food. FAO concluded that food wastage from agricultural production leaves a water footprint equivalent to the annual water discharge of the Russian river Volga – about 250 km3.

However, since food waste is a result of human behavior, humans also have the power to stop what we have started. This is the opinion of Selina Juul, founder of the Danish movement against food waste, which is simply called: “Stop Wasting Food.”

At a TED x Copenhagen in 2012, she said: “I was born in Moscow. When I came to the West 19 years ago, I was shocked to see the amount of food. But I was also shocked to see the amount of food people wasted without giving it a second thought.”

Selina Juul. Photo by Andreas Mikkel Hansen.

The “Stop Wasting Food” movement works to change the Danish consumers’ behavior and has helped the country reduce its food waste by 25 percent. For instance, Selina Juul has published a cookbook about leftovers and made a retail chain create a quantity discount in their shops.

Similar anti-food waste movements exist all over the world from Ireland to Singapore and they all have advice for what we as consumers can do to limit our food waste.

For instance, buy and cook just enough food, store it properly so it lasts longer and plan your meals so you’re less likely to buy too much.

According to Selina Juul, it is just a question of using what she calls “the power of the consumer.”

“It is quite simple,” she states. “Stop being a consumer zombie. You are in control of your grocery shopping. It is not controlling you.”

Even though it might seem unmanageable for one person to affect the whole supply chain from the supermarkets to the food producers, Selina Juul believes that our everyday actions will have an effect in the long run:

“Of course we cannot send the leftovers from our plate to the starving people in Africa but the fact that we in the West are over-consuming, and the fact that we throw food away, is affecting the global demand for food and the global food prices. So, what we do here does affect people on the other side of the planet.”

By Ida Scharla Løjmand

Photo Credit:

Jon Bunting, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Taz, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

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“Not just a feminist.”

Ida Scharla Løjmand — Wed, 10 May 2017 13:11:13 +0000

“I am not a feminist. I am an intersectional feminist.”

This is how a friend of mine described herself when our conversation one day touched upon women’s rights. To me, this first sounded slightly paradoxical. Wasn’t a movement like feminism supposed to be united in the fight for gender equality? What was the point of separating it into more subcategories?

My friend’s counter-argument was that there is no such thing as just one united kind of feminism as women’s needs differ all over the world. That seemed legit. However, since the term of “intersectional feminism” was new to me, I still didn’t understand what it covers and where it comes from. This is what I aim to do in this article.

Photo: Lindsey Jene Scalera

The term “intersectional feminism” is defined in different words by different feminist scholars. What unifies them is the emphasis on the fact that a woman is not a universal category and that different women fight different battles all over the world.

Juliet Williams, professor of gender studies at UCLA, puts it this way: “Intersectional feminism is a form of feminism that stands for the rights and empowerment of all women, taking seriously the fact of differences among women, including different identities based on radicalization, sexuality, economic status, nationality, religion, and language.”

Recognizing these differences is crucial, according to Ruth Enid Zambrana, director of the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity at the University of Maryland.

“Intersectionalism is crucial,” she writes. “How do we begin to disentangle ‘women’ from ‘African American women’ from ‘Puerto Rican’ women from ‘Mexican American women’ from ‘international women’?”

Maybe it is a rising awareness of diversity that have shed more light on the term intersectional feminism the past years and put it on the lips of, for instance, the women protesting against Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year.

However, intersectional feminism is not a new concept. It was named already in 1989 by the American professor of law Kimberlé W. Crenshaw. Her definition frames intersectional feminism as “the view that women experience oppression in varying configurations and in varying degrees of intensity […] Examples of this include race, gender, class, ability, and ethnicity.”

So, intersectional feminism is aiming to raise awareness of the different challenges and discrimination women

experience. It stresses that women of different class, ethnicity, sexuality etc. have different experiences and problems.

Back in 2014, the British comedian and feminist Ava Vidal wrote in a column in The Telegraph: “There is no one-size-fits-all type of feminism” as a comment on what she defined as mainstream feminism – “a feminism that is overwhelmingly white, middle class, cis-gendered and able bodied.”

Nasime Naseri, Human Rights-student and volunteer for the Swedish association “Kvinna till Kvinna” (“Woman to Woman”), has similar views as Williams, Zambrana, Crenshaw and Vidal.

“Intersectional feminism, to me, is inclusive,” she says. “This type of feminism considers how women face gender discrimination in multiply different ways, for example being a woman, coloured and lesbian. These factors put in a disadvantaged position compared to white heterosexual women.”

She explains: “For example, people tell me I look exotic and it makes me feel objectified – it’s a word you use for plants or animals, not humans. When people say this, they refer to white beauty standards like I’m not normal.”

Photo: Paul Sableman

When asked if feminism – being the belief that men and women are equal – does not automatically include all types of women, Naseri answers: “Mainstream feminism only focuses on issues based solely on gender. It forgets to consider that for e.g. ethnicity also has an impact on how a woman faces gender discrimination. Intersectional feminism considers this.”

She stresses that she does not consider intersectional feminism an only black women’s movement.

“I don’t identify as an intersectional feminist just because I’m a person of colour,” she states. “Everyone can be an intersectional feminist. I identify as such because of my own experiences and because of seeing how my friends and family face discrimination. By only focusing on one part of a problem, we will not find a solution for everyone despite ethnicity, social group and who they love. By being inclusive and joining together we have more chances for change.”

At the same time, she also rejects that intersectional feminism is separating the whole movement into different categories.

“I don’t see intersectional feminists as a sub-group,” she says. “Intersectional feminism is representing people from different social classes, identity groups and it considers how different people face discrimination. So instead of creating a conflict, I think intersectional feminism, by considering things that the first feminist movement did not, is adding more and making feminism more inclusive.”

According to Ava Vidal’s column, it is necessary for the feminism movement to recognize the intersectional development. Otherwise it can possibly cause a backlash to the whole feminism movement.

“Until the mainstream feminist movement starts listening to the various groups of women within it, then it will continue to stagnate and not be able to move forward,” Vidal writes. “The only result of this is that the movement will become fragmented and will continue to be less effective.”

By Ida Scharla Løjmand

Image credit:

Picture 1: Lindsey Jene Scalera, lincensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Picture 2: Paul Sableman, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

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Living on the Edge of Society

Ida Scharla Løjmand — Sun, 10 Jan 2016 13:00:22 +0000

To many, the Romani people are shrouded in mystery and prejudices. Some might think of a woman in a long skirt reading the future on your palm. Others may picture beggars and poor people living in caravans when hearing the word “Roma”.

Prejudices seem to stick to the Romani people wherever they go and it seems hard – if not impossible – to figure out the truth about who these people are and why many of them live in severe poverty, isolated from the rest of the society.

Citizens of Malmö, Sweden may remember the Malmö Police shutting down a Roma camp outside the city in the beginning of November 2015.

Shortly before the clearing of the camp, the Romani peoples’ translator, Catalon Mihai, was quoted in the Danish newspaper, Berlingske, saying that the Romas did not want to return to their home country, and that they were “determined to create better conditions for their children in the Swedish welfare state”.

If “better conditions” equal living in a caravan on a polluted industrial site, what kind of life have the Romas left behind in their home countries? Poverty, unemployment and discrimination is what they escape, according to reports from both the Council of Europe and supporting NGO’s.

In fact, the Romani people have faced ruthless and unending discrimination through history.

According to the Austrian database of Roma history and culture, Rombase, the Roma people originally came to Europe from today’s India. They are said to have their origin in the Indian Dom caste, a caste placed very low in the Indian hierarchical system centuries ago.

Historians assume that the Doms had their own small kingdom, which was destroyed by the Gupta Dynasty in the 6^th or 7^th century. At that time, the Doms lost their power and position and became a lower caste. The Romas seem to have been considered a lower class all the way back to their Indian ancestors.

From India, the Romas came to Iran, Greece and East and Western Europe.

Some historical sources on Rombase refer to the Roma as “terrible looking people” with bad manners, but they were also known as good blacksmiths, musicians and fortunetellers practicing palmistry.

However, many Europeans were skeptical as the Romani people started to arrive in Europe during the Middle Ages.

Racism against the Roma became entrenched in peoples’ minds so deeply that the Roma during World War II also suffered from Hitler’s ethnic cleansing, and where subjected to persecution and deportation to concentration camps. After the war, the Romas did not receive any compensation or help in order to recover from the trauma.

The survivors of persecution during World War II remain in many European countries today.

“Human rights of Roma and Travellers in Europe” report from the Council of Europe, 2012, states that Roma people are being threatened and beaten up in several European countries.

Roma houses have also been set on fire and occasionally the perpetrators have shot the victims trying to escape the flames.

In other countries with less violent incidents, the Council reports about Roma families and groups receiving threats from local non-Romas in order to prevent them from camping in the area.

The threats and violence do not only come from skinheads and neo-Nazi groups. “Normal” non-Roma citizens are also reported to have participated in the attacks.

Apart from the violence, many Romas suffer from poverty and unemployment, often just because of their ethnicity. In a survey carried out by the FRA (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights) and UNDP (United Nations Development Program) in 2011 at least one quarter of Roma respondents from 11 European countries stated, that they experienced discrimination because of their background in daily life and when looking for jobs.

In Romania, being a Roma is the worst social stigma, according to ERRC (European Roma Rights Center) and many politicians and artists of Roma origin hide or reject their identity to avoid discrimination and the ending of their career.

Incidents like those mentioned above block the road to integration, according to Gabriel Moreno, a Spanish Roma or Gitano, as they call themselves in Spain.

“The society cannot expect the Roma to integrate as if no harm has been done to them,” he argues in the documentary “Romanipen” by Ima Garmendia & Kike del Olmo.

To Gabriel and his family it is normal to be aware of danger. Thereby, he highlights that his and his family’s approach toward the non-Romani Spanish society is shaped by the fear created through the past experiences.

Gabriel Moreno thinks that something needs to be done: “Society has built a stereotype of the Roma that we need to break once and for all, in the same way society is breaking architectural barriers for handicapped people. In the same way we have to work against the barriers of racism.”

On the other hand, Beata Olahova, a Roma social worker from Slovakia, argues that the Roma people also need to take a responsibility themselves.

“Roma in general are not doing enough to change their situation,” she says. She admits, though, that the non-Romani people bear a great deal of the guilt, also: “I do understand it is not an easy task, because for a long time the Roma have been discriminated against. That’s why it is difficult for them to start doing something for themselves and fight for their rights,” she says.

So are the Romani people poor because they are discriminated against or do they make a conscious decision not to be a part of society?

There seems to be no definitive answer to this problem, but a definitive fact is that something needs to be done, as Europe now has an entire ethnic group living on the edge of society. The crucial question is how Romani and non-Romani allies should stand up for their rights when discrimination, persecution and fear is a major part of their history.

The Romani history is not only one of travelling, but also one of insecurity, suffering, and suspicion from both the surrounding communities and the Romani people themselves. It seems like many Roma people have embraced the identity as Europe’s outcasts, and neither they – nor the surrounding societies – know how to heal the historical wounds that have been bleeding for centuries.

Years of mutual suspicion are hard to break free from, both for the discriminated and those who discriminate.

By Ida Scharla Løjmand

Image credit:

Picture 1: Giusi Barbiani, licensed by CC BY-NC 2.0

Picture 2: Giusi Barbiani, licensed by CC BY-NC 2.0

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