Nearly 1,000 Gypsies (also known as Roma) were expelled last month from France and returned to their home countries of Romania and Bulgaria. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has blamed them for the increase in the country’s crime rate, and demolished dozens of makeshift camps where Gypsies lived.
And the rest of the 12 million Gypsies in Europe don’t have it any easier; For over a thousand years since they came to Europe from India, Gypsies have been subjected to discrimination and violence.
Among them is Sasho Radoslavov, a 31 year-old Bulgarian Gypsy, born in Bulgaria’s capital city of Sofia. He has five brothers, three sisters, and several children. He has a primary education and comes across as intelligent and well-mannered. While showing his ID to prove he is a legal citizen of Bulgaria, he shared his recent life experience as a Gypsy.
After working for five years for the cleaning company “Baks 99,” he was fired last month due to personnel cuts. Now he rummages through trash cans across the city, hoping to support his family by selling what he finds. But his heart is gripped with fear; he and the rest of the Gypsies around him constantly face the danger of beatings and even death in the streets of Sofia.
“The other day I saw some iron poles on the street, and I took them from the ground,“ said Radoslavov. ”There was a group of five to six men standing nearby, at my age. One of them yelled: ‘Hey, Gypsy, why are you rummaging through the bin? Get out of here!’”
Radoslavov said that it is already a trivial matter that teenagers spit at him and humiliate him.
“I don’t know how their parents educate them,” he said, adding that things have gotten worse with the recent appearance of neo-Nazis.
And the rest of the 12 million Gypsies in Europe don’t have it any easier; For over a thousand years since they came to Europe from India, Gypsies have been subjected to discrimination and violence.
Among them is Sasho Radoslavov, a 31 year-old Bulgarian Gypsy, born in Bulgaria’s capital city of Sofia. He has five brothers, three sisters, and several children. He has a primary education and comes across as intelligent and well-mannered. While showing his ID to prove he is a legal citizen of Bulgaria, he shared his recent life experience as a Gypsy.
After working for five years for the cleaning company “Baks 99,” he was fired last month due to personnel cuts. Now he rummages through trash cans across the city, hoping to support his family by selling what he finds. But his heart is gripped with fear; he and the rest of the Gypsies around him constantly face the danger of beatings and even death in the streets of Sofia.
“The other day I saw some iron poles on the street, and I took them from the ground,“ said Radoslavov. ”There was a group of five to six men standing nearby, at my age. One of them yelled: ‘Hey, Gypsy, why are you rummaging through the bin? Get out of here!’”
Radoslavov said that it is already a trivial matter that teenagers spit at him and humiliate him.
“I don’t know how their parents educate them,” he said, adding that things have gotten worse with the recent appearance of neo-Nazis.
