02.10.2013Roma Pride Bulgaria 2013
Roma Pride Bulgaria 2013
For third consecutive year Center Amalipe will celebrate Roma Pride
„Roma Pride” 2013 will be celebrated on 6th of October under the motto “My dream for Bulgaria – to live and study together!”. Center Amalipe wants to keep this motto permanently for the Roma Pride campaign, because it clearly shows what we aim with these activities. Aim of the campaign is to show that the Roma people are also part of the other ethnics, they study and live together with the non-Roma people and it is like that for thousands of years. There are a lot of things that the Roma people can be proud of, because they have their culture and traditions. They have also redounded for the cultural development of many other nations. The Roma culture is part of the national culture of the countries they live in. They are also part of the European traditions and history and proud of being Roma. They are proud of the surviving through the ages that have preserved their language and traditions, they are proud for not being assimilated by ethnicity (as gone very powerful groups and tribes of the story). Roma people are proud of that they want to live and study together with the other ethnics and nations.
Center Amalipe organized Roma Pride campaign for very first time in 2011, as a part of the national European initiative EGAM (European Grassroots Antiracist Movement) Roma Pride. The campaign will be pursued in the whole country and a number of hundreds students, teachers and citizens will take part in. The activities will be conducted by the centers for community development (local structures of Center Amalipe) formed in 11 municipalities and 8 regions, together with the youth centers of project “Youth is tolerance”, financed by the European commission under program \"Fundamental Rights and Active Citizenship\". These youth centers are placed in the regions of Burgas, Blagoevgrad, Veliko Tarnovo, Vratsa, Plovdiv and Shumen.
The campaign in Bulgaria is a part of the Roma Pride campaign that will be pursued in big number of the European countries.
Different kinds of activities will be conducted in different spots in Bulgaria. Reading of Roma literature in public, music and dances, traditional dishes, traditional clothes, exhibition of paintings, exhibition of different antique household items, crafts, distribution of flayers, collecting wishes form the citizens about the Roma people, video contest in two parts: “I’m proud to be Roma, because…” and “My dream about the Roma people”. There will be also presenting of the best videos made trough the contest in some of the cities. In one of the cities will be pursued an interesting performance about the Holocaust. Different people will read texts and watch documental movies about the Roma during the Holocaust. This will happen on 7th of October in art club TAM, Veliko Tarnovo.
You can find attached a map with the participating villages and cities in Bulgaria.
For more contacts and information:
Momchil Baev 0884 91 25 08
Romeliya Mihtieva 0882 36 95 81
EUROPEAN MANIFESTO 25/09/2013, EGAM
Dignity for Roma people in Europe!
Who can still ignore the racial discriminations striking Roma people everywhere in Europe? The list of discrimination, rejection and racist violence that they face, like a baleful litany, is ever-growing and could sink into despair.
In Romania, entire communities are rejected to secluded areas surrounded by walls, lacking water and electricity, like in Slovakia, where Roma women are sterilized. In Bulgaria, they are confined in urban ghettos. In the Czech Republic, they are targeted by an increasing number of neo-Nazi demonstrations. In Croatia, they get Molotov cocktails thrown at them. In Hungary, they are harassed and assaulted by the Jobbik paramilitary militia and therefore have to seek shelter abroad. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, they suffer daily discriminations like in Italy, Moldavia or Serbia. In France, the calls for hatred and even for extermination increase, and Roma people still suffer from stigmatizations and even expulsions similar to the ones that took place under the former government. Some of them are forced to go back to Kosovo, as a consequence of the on-going expulsions from Germany, Denmark or Sweden.
The violence of these discrimination varies according to the countries, but their nature remains the same everywhere. They draw their origins from the same stigmatizing representations and the same over-used stereotypes.
Memory is also directly attacked sometimes; this certainly helps make these discrimination linger on. In Lety, for example, in Czech Republic, a piggery has been built on the site of a former Nazi camp, sullying the memory of the 1,300 Roma people who were concentrated there between 1942 and 1943 – only 300 of them survived deportation and their stay in the camp.
In front of this bleak reality, the reaction of the political institutions has not been up to the seriousness of the situation – in some cases it even led to its deterioration.
As it could be expected, the “National strategies for Roma inclusion” presented by the EU member-states to the European Commission in late 2011, often planning no budget, no goals and no measures, did not allow any improvement of the situation regarding the social misery and racial domination to which Roma communities are too often confronted. Because it lacks power, legitimacy and sometimes conviction, the Commission has not taken the necessary European measures, while the situation is getting dangerously worse for these communities all around Europe.
It is time for the member-states to stop implementing strategies of avoidance or even rejection, and for the UE to appear as guarantor as far as the observance of the fundamental rights for all individuals is concerned, even though this can lead to a conflict with the member-states. The fundamental values of Europe are at stake here.
Unlike political institutions, the civil society has gotten decisively involved, consequently bringing hope and prospects for the future to a whole continent.
For three years now, the Roma Pride has been both the origin and the symbol of this involvement. This vast movement of self-emancipation brings together Roma leaders and organizations and the rest of the European civil society, altogether committed for equality and against the different expressions of racism.
The Roma Pride spirit is a spirit of dignity, justice and solidarity that nourishes the numerous initiatives led by the civil society throughout Europe.
On August 2nd, several hundreds of people gathered in dignity on the site of Auschwitz concentration camp to commemorate the Roma genocide, and more particularly the night between August 2nd and 3rd of 1944, when 2,500 Roma people were killed there. This date must be part of the European commemorative calendar: the Samudaripen memory must be given the place it deserves and the current discrimination, rejection and racist violence must be fought by pointing out clearly where they come from.
After the series of racist killings against Roma people in Hungary, the victims and the civil society asked for justice, not revenge. More than three years of proceedings later, the culprits were fairly and heavily punished.
The civil society has reacted to the revolting provocations and threats from the neo-Nazis in Czech Republic with solidarity and by calling for the respect of the law.
While the enduring crisis exacerbates nationalist hatred and incites to designate the most fragile ones as responsible for this crisis, when they are actually the first victims of it, we call on all individuals to express their desire to live together in Europe, with our differences in cultures, languages and identities, and to experience their solidarity beyond borders.
On Sunday, October 6th, we will all gather at the same time for the Roma Pride in about 15 European countries, from Paris to Kiev, from Oslo to Istanbul via Prague, Budapest or Bucharest. We are determined to show why and how we can live together in a truly democratic Europe – that is, when we get rid of racism and nationalism at last.
