On Monday, the Sun announced "victory" for the 52,876 readers who supported its "Britain Has Had Enough" campaign to rid the nation of Gypsy beggars. ("Labour research," the article claims, "shows begging refugees is voters' third-most important issue after health and education.") Though the violence of the outcry has been striking, particularly in a boom economy, it isn't very surprising that Gypsies are exciting hatred in the press. Gypsies have always excited hatred in the press. For hundreds of years they have played a small but lively part in the European imagination, and these days, when so much of public discourse is deadened by euphemism, Gypsies are perhaps the last group up for grabs. (Is the beggar named as Maria Nistor going to complain when a reporter - the Sun again - claims that she has named her baby "Lucifer"?) These familiar strangers are regarded monolithically; their given name is a synonym for thieves and cheats. As beggars and as Gypsies they are now also emblematic of all asylum seekers: beggars and presumed cheats at the gate of the west.
But it is readers who are being "gypped". For in page after page of pious press coverage, myth has displaced history and opinion has displaced fact - facts either about their circumstances or about immigration policy. I haven't seen any accounts of the trauma of the trip over: about the terror of being dumped, or sexually assaulted, by the paid trafficker; about the constant fear of rejection and attack which is compounded immeasurably where there are children involved. For all the fresh outrage, the story is not new. In 1992, I met a group of Romanian Gypsies as they prepared to wade across a river into Germany. By the time I caught up with them, this family of four adults, five children and two babies had crossed three borders and more than a thousand miles, in slippers. What I saw in their faces does not tally with the touted image of Romanian Gypsies arriving by the lorryload, happy as Heidis on a hayride.
And where are the reports about the situation in Romania now? Or are we supposed to imagine that there are people prepared to uproot themselves and their small ones, with maximum uncertainty and danger, on a whim? Nor is there any talk of how dramatically immigration policy has shifted in Britain and throughout the European Union: of how, since the 1980s, important distinctions between asylum seekers and other kinds of deserving migrants have been eroded, so that, for the first time in our modern history (and in pitiful contrast to the benevolent policies of the post-war period), the low immigration targets set by governments have taken priority and influenced the assessment of would-be immigrants from the poorer world. In other words, the question of "need" is no longer about them and theirs, it's about us and ours.
The barbaric feel of many recent reports has much to do with ignorance - both genuine and wilful: the easiest way to dehumanise people is to strip them of any context, of any history. And, with very little in the way of a written history of their own, with no book, no anthem, no flag or popular story about the founding of their nation; with no state or power of any kind except in numbers, the Gypsies are particularly vulnerable to such mythologising.
The centre-piece of the current story, and its proud centerpiece, is the assertion that Gypsies despise their own children - the flipside of the old favourite that they steal other people's babies - and cynically use them as "props". Here is what I know about Gypsies and their babies, gleaned from many years of study, predominantly in eastern and central Europe. First, being a mother is regarded as a woman's single-most important task; indeed, failure to bear children often leads to shame and even exclusion from the group. Second, Gypsy women, whatever the earnings of their husbands, are ultimately charged with supporting and feeding their children. Third, the women - for whom begging is not generally felt to be shameful (as it would be for the men) - are deeply resistant to being separated from their children under any circumstances. They, in turn, are reliably scandalised by the way non-Gypsy women willingly arrange for their children to be cared for by non-family members.
Gypsies are profoundly mistrustful of outside influences: understandable, when you consider the draconian drives, at least in eastern and central Europe, to assimilate them. Since the 18th century such measures have included the removal of Gypsy children into Christian institutions and homes (a practice continued in Switzerland until 1973), and, under the communists, the compulsory changing of Gypsy names. All in all, in any interaction with non-Gypsies, at home or abroad, they live in tense anticipation of ill-will, bad faith, rejection and harm. If children are toughened by what they see, their parents may feel that this is appropriate training for an expected lifetime of hate directed at them.
It is worth reminding ourselves of their extraordinary past, not as "some sopping-wet liberal excuse", but as the only meaningful basis for intelligent discussion about their future, in Britain and elsewhere. And such a discussion must be of interest to us all, not just because they are Europeans too, but because they are Europe's largest and fastest growing minority.
The lives of Gypsies, since they left India at the beginning of the last millennium, has consisted of deportation and nomadism, homelessness and statelessness, interwoven with episodes of forced assimilation as well as incarceration and massacre. In Romania, where most of these recent arrivals come from, Gypsies were slaves for 400 years, until 1864 when slavery was abolished in Romania.
Under the Nazis, at least half a million were murdered. They were the only group apart from the Jews slated for annihilation on racial grounds. Gypsies have only recently begun to commemorate their Holocaust dead, but they remain without a homeland. Perhaps uniquely they are also without any apparent desire for one. Instead, these periods of extreme persecution are reasonably regarded by them as forming part of the great continuum of persecution. It would not be far-fetched to wonder whether, in the case of the Gypsies, "nomad" is perhaps nothing more than a travel agent's kind of term for "deportee".
And what of the situation of Gypsies today? A brief look at a recent week in the life of Gypsies around Europe shows that there is rather more to the story than the nursery frighteners and prejudices of our grandparents that are emotionally invoked in place of investigation.
On March 2, in Tirgu-Mures, Romania, four policemen reportedly punched a drunk Gypsy to the ground and then kicked him as a crowd of Gypsies looked on. Approximately 25 further police were called in to disperse the crowd, beating them, yelling racial epithets and spraying children with teargas. The European Roma Rights Centre, a Budapest-based public-interest law group and monitoring organisation, reports 19 cases of police brutality in Romania between 1996 and 1998, none of them resulting in the conviction, or even the prosecution, of an officer involved.
On March 3, on the outskirts of Rome, some 400 carabinieri reporting to the ministry of defence, swooped in the early hours on a "camp for nomads". They detained and checked all residents for the required permits, issued by local police. The 112 "nomads" who did not have permits were taken in two police buses to Fiumicino airport, whence at least 56 of them, including a couple of under-age girls without their parents, were that afternoon deported to Bosnia. A similar operation took place the next day at a different camp in Rome. The collective expulsion of aliens in Italy is - like the treatment of Gypsies in most other states - in clear contravention of a number of conventions to which the host country is a signatory.
In Slovakia the persecution is mainly by skinheads. Last year in the Czech Republic the northern Bohemian city of Usti Nad Labem erected a high wall around its Gypsy ghetto, creating a Gypsy enclosure. Another report from the ERRC, called A Special Remedy, details, over 137 pages, the routine placement of Gypsy children (some 62%) in schools for the mentally handicapped, often on the basis of tests lasting half an hour, or without any test at all. These Gypsy placements, made in vastly disproportionate numbers to the Czech population (of which Gypsies account for less than 3%), are most often effected without the full comprehension of their parents. They are not given to understand, for example, that once in the "special" schools their children will have almost no chance of further education or decent employment. Here is the genuine scandal about Gypsy children - one which has not yet attracted the attention of the press.
You begin to see why defiance may be the characteristic most necessary to their survival, but also the one most annoying to others. As visitors, they would be much more popular if their desperation was not so demanding. It has seemed particularly to irritate people that they don't even bother to try to arouse our pity. And it's true, they don't ask for it and they don't want it. Meanwhile, across eastern Europe, it would be hard to overstate the reflexive hatred people feel for them, even among otherwise nice, rational people. And yet, that non-engagement, their eternal separateness, has been the price of their survival.
The unpleasant aggressiveness of these incomparably weak people is a godsend to politicians. As is the press campaign against the beggars. Just as Gypsies have consistently kept people at bay by frightening them, the government must be hoping that the rumour of a "hard" Britain will discourage new immigrants. If so, they dangerously underestimate the need and ambitions of many people from the east and the south.
In 1993, I went to a castle in eastern Germany to join politicians, academics and a handful of Gypsy leaders - including Romania's only Gypsy MP - in search of alternative solutions to the already dismal pattern of asylum seeking and rejection for the huge numbers of new post-cold war migrants, and to explore any possible benefit from the Gypsy migration in particular. Over a few days, contributors shared experiences and outlined various survival strategies for migrants. At the end, as the different working groups met to report on their "findings", it was apparent that most of the Gypsy delegation was absent. They were outside in the castle parking lot, larking about in a pair of toy-like two-door cars, the twin Trabants they had just picked up for $45 (£28) and $90 (£56) respectively. The Gypsies, including our lone MP, looked like boy teenagers anywhere, poking under the hoods of their new wheels. They were jubilant - after all, this was what most Gypsy migrants were coming to Germany for: to buy cars for resale in the east, at no cost to the German social or welfare system. No, these were not people who needed to be schooled in survival strategies.
The 1951 Convention, the central international instrument designed to protect refugees, guarantees asylum for those with a "well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion." It doesn't actually specify state-sponsored persecution, as it is sometimes interpreted to mean. Many of the Gypsies from the former eastern bloc seem solid candidates. But for reasons of pride and of income, they, like their Romanian MP, would rather come over for short visits, as businessmen.
The car-dealing parliamentarian was, in many ways, an average sort of Gypsy (and an ideal modern European). He had several professions and spoke many languages; he preferred and intended to live in the country of his birth but also, periodically, even seasonally, he needed to travel for work. Like nearly all Gypsies I have met, he had no cause to expect a hand-out and no desire for one. His behaviour in eastern Germany did not undermine the project of the conference. On the contrary, it showed how very naturally such solutions can work. Most Gypsies, like most people with the wrong address, would like to be given the chance to earn and to contribute, but asylum seekers have neither. And, since the quiet abandonment of other legal options, "asylum" is the only game in town - a battle of wits we can't win. Expecting deportation, they have nothing to lose. The sooner we admit it the better: our topsy-turvy restrictions make beggars of us all.