The story of a blonde toddler found living in a Roma encampment in central Greece became somewhat more complicated when it was revealed that "Maria" was actually the daughter of a Bulgarian Roma family. Even before that twist, a front-page story (below the fold) in today's New York Times reveals that Roma families across Europe are frightened that their kids could be taken from them just because of how they look.
Whatever the outcome, the Roma say that it is they who now live in fear — of having their children snatched for no reason other than their cultural identity or skin color. The cases, they say, have helped fan a sometimes violent backlash against the roughly 11 million Roma scattered across Europe. In an era of budget cutbacks and high unemployment, politicians on both the left and the right have singled out the Roma as emblematic of the problems of illegal immigration and have questioned whether they can ever be integrated.
“Imagine if the situation were reversed and the children were brown and the parents were white, would they have ever been taken away?” said Dezideriu Gergely, the executive director of the European Roma Rights Center, based in Budapest. “The most dangerous consequence of the hysteria is that now we have to live in fear that our children can be removed from us on the basis of a wrong perception. No one should be profiled on the basis of their ethnicity.”
That fear became reality for two Roma families in Ireland who had their children taken from them solely on suspicions that with their blond features, they couldn't possibly be Roma. However, after DNA testing proved the Roma were indeed their parents, they were returned in short order.
In recent weeks, there has been a spike in anti-Roma sentiment. For instance, Serbian skinheads tried to snatch a Roma child after noticing his complexion was much fairer than that of his father. And the head of the Greek Union of Roma says that for the first time in years, he's heard chants of "Gypsies, thieves!" and seen Roma people begging for food get met with shoves into the street. As a black man, some of the stories I've heard about Roma stereotypes send a chill down my spine. In some cases, all you have to do is replace "Roma" with "black." In some respects, it's even worse--Gergely says that many Roma are forced to run from their ethnicity as they move up in the world.
The racist sentiment seems to be creeping into the coverage of this story as well, even though admittedly there's a lot about the couple with whom Maria was found that stinks to high heaven. The couple, Christos Salis and Eleftheria Dimopoulou, gave any number of stories about how they found Maria. Additionally, they have 14 kids registered in different regions of Greece, and six of them were supposedly born within the last 10 months. That being said, though, we've heard almost nothing about the condition of the other children, even though they reportedly lived in ghastly conditions.
This looks like a case where fighting a great evil may be being used to further the cause of an equally great evil.