The Names

27 May 2004

Claude Cahn

For a period of time just after our founding that in my memory now seems like about twenty minutes but at the time must have been closer to three or four months, we were called the "Roma Legal Resource Center". How different the imagined history of the "RLRC" is from that of the project called ERRC! It is hard to imagine even using an exclamation point in an editorial of a journal that, I suppose, would have been named "Roma Legal Resources", had we stayed the course upon which we originally embarked long enough to issue a publication under our original name.

An early memory from shortly after becoming "The European Roma Rights Center": Several tens of people are gathered in a dingy hall somewhere in the suburbs of Budapest to discuss human rights issues facing Roma in Europe. This was back when conferences on Roma were held in dingy halls in the suburbs of Budapest (it is circa 1996, I think). We are milling in the gray foyer because the only government official attending, an undersecretary of the deputy head of the department of something irrelevant, had already left. A Romani activist has cornered me and objects in no uncertain terms to the use of the phrase "Roma rights"; "We are fighting for equality, for equal access to inherent human rights. Why 'Roma rights'? We don't want any special privileges. Why do you muddy the waters with your 'Roma rights'?" Later a non-Romani guest at the ERRC pursues a similar theme from a different angle: "What are Roma rights?" At that time, we had a cliché which we dusted off for all such occasions: "Roma rights, because human rights are universal, but human rights violations fall disproportionately (and in different ways) against certain groups."

With the passage of time, I have on a number of occasions admired our name for the sheer level of frictive heat it was and is capable of generating. There have been weeks when it seemed no one could pass our name without turning it for scrutiny, as if it were a mental puzzle to be resolved with several deft strokes. At some points it was possible to imagine "Roma rights" as a piece of ground at the perfect median between several discourses, a pole of sorts at which we have established ourselves, until some great upheaval makes remaining at the particular spot of "Roma rights" untenable and we are driven upward at explosive speed to some new paradigmatic plane. Said differently: our name, our idea, our two-word slogan, our project has at times generated intense controversy.

Last summer, the World Bank and the Open Society Institute held a conference in Budapest to herald a "Decade of Roma Inclusion". Three prime ministers attended. The dingy hall at the back of Budapest was replaced by the Hotel Intercontinental. The atmosphere was decidedly celebratory. I can't remember anyone there calling us to task for our purportedly misguided name. In April of this year the European Union held another quite un-dingy conference in Brussels on "Roma in an Enlarged European Union". We have arrived, one might think. This must be the new paradigmatic plane.

One person in attendance at the European Union conference was Eric Thomsen. Eric is a Roma rights activist based at an organisation in Denmark called "Romano". The majority of the work of "Romano", as far as I can tell, involves assisting Roma from Serbia and Montenegro whom the government of Denmark is trying very hard to expel. Eric has sought a hearing concerning these expulsions at most of the institutional doors of Europe. These endeavors have not, on the face of it, been very successful. For example, his effort to have the European Court of Human Rights review the case of a Romani man slated for expulsion to Kosovo was rejected without hearing. (Full disclosure: the case was brought by the ERRC; his failure is ours). Eric found the celebratory atmosphere of the EU conference somewhat hard to take and at one point during the question-and-answer period following a plenary session, he took to reading out the names of people whom he had tried to assist and who had subsequently been expelled from Denmark. This made some people edgy, including a number of persons I recall from the dingy edge of Budapest, back in the day, who now sat on the podium.

This editorial is for Eric, who voiced the Romani names of the victims, apparently as an antidote to being dazed by spectacle. We could never have really been for long the "Roma Legal Resource Center" or the "Roma Human Rights Center". Those names would never have fully captured the fact that we are about people like Mirjana Kalderas, expelled to Belgrade last month without her family despite still having open applications for a residence permit in Denmark, because Danish authorities will not tolerate the idea of a foreign Gypsy woman establishing in their country. In the sound of her Romani name, her predicament. In our name, her issues as yet unresolved.

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