Today, I begin a “Salzburg Journal” — a variety of jottings from Mozart’s hometown. Musical, sociological, etc. (Culinary!)
In this Part I, I address an issue I address every year, I suppose: the Gypsies who dot Salzburg, in their begging racket. Generation after generation, this racket goes on, and generation after generation, children are condemned to take part in it.
Someone has to smash this cycle. Sometime. Somehow.
Permit a little walk down Memory Lane: In the mid-1990s, I took part in a conference for journalists in the new Eastern Europe — the newly freed and democratic Eastern Europe. There could be real journalism, for the first time in decades.
I spoke with a young man from Bucharest — a liberal (in the older and better sense). We were talking about the problems of Romania. And I said, “Yes, and then there’s discrimination against the Roma,” or the Gypsies. His expression changed.
And then he explained — I’ll put it in a nutshell — that they were much more sinning than sinned against.
In the last 20 years, I have learned a lot more about the Gypsies and Gypsy life. I am sadder and wiser — indignant and wiser.
Last month, I read an AP report out of Bucharest, which began,
Dozens of vulnerable men and boys were kidnapped, chained, whipped, fed scraps and forced to work or fight each other for entertainment over an eight-year period in rural southern Romania, prosecutors said Wednesday.
Three men and two boys aged between 10 and 12 were found chained up and were rescued by police Wednesday in the mountain town of Berevoiesti during searches at the homes of suspects — members of an extended Roma family. Organized-crime prosecutors said the investigation involves some 90 suspects who they say exploited around 65 people with physical and mental disabilities or who were very poor, making them log wood, beg or look after animals.
The article continues,
A prosecutors’ statement said some victims were snatched from railway and bus stations, outside churches or even from their own homes and transported to private homes by members of the group. Some of them performed domestic chores while others were made to transport and sell wood that was the product of illegal logging.
It said the captives were sometimes held in chains, whipped, beaten and threatened, refused food or made to eat off the ground, and coerced into fighting each other for entertainment. They were locked up overnight to prevent them escaping. Some were stripped naked and doused with hot or cold water. There are suspicions some were raped or sexually abused.
Etc., etc.
I sent this article to a friend of mine, with a furious comment or two. I knew he would understand. He is Cvetin Chilimanov, an intellectual and journalist in Macedonia.
He said,
It’s a disaster. I live in a nice neighborhood here, but it’s very close to a Roma slum (set up on land taken away by the Communists from my great-grandfather). I’d have my girl taken away from me by the authorities if I did 10 percent of the stuff their kids are forced to endure daily and in plain sight of everybody.
If we ever have a GOP administration again, it needs to make enforcement of child-abuse laws a priority for countries that still look up to and listen to the U.S.; demand that we take away the children from delinquent parents; and send all these poor babies for adoption in the U.S.
Bad, bad cycles are made to be broken. May we live to see this one broken. Smashed.