EU membership a boon to Gypsies

TIRGU BUJOR, Romania — Tired of reading soap-opera subtitles to his wife while watching TV, Costel Pitigoi issued her a decree: Learn to read them yourself.

So Maria Pitigoi joined 29 other women in this town’s Gypsy enclave in a new reading program aimed at putting the long-mistreated ethnic group on a more equal footing with Europe’s other peoples.

For Maria and her classmates — whose own hardships eclipse any soap-opera plot — literacy is a dream come true. For Romania and other countries with significant Gypsy populations, it’s part of a broader push to lift the embattled minority out of poverty and persecution.

While specialists say this could take decades, there may never be greater inducement. Improving life for Gypsies, or Roma as many call themselves, has become a requirement for membership in the European Union.

Most of Europe’s 7 million to 9 million Gypsies live in countries set to join the expanding European Union. Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic become members May 1; Romania and Bulgaria hope to join in 2007.

Slovakia has spent millions of dollars to bring roads, electricity and running water to Gypsy communities. Hungary set up educational and antidiscrimination projects, while the Czechs are training Gypsies to become police officers.

This is a moment when Gypsy needs intersect with European interests. Leaders of EU nations want the poor of countries joining the bloc to have opportunities at home, to make it less likely they will migrate, seeking better lives elsewhere on the Continent.

Still, human-rights activists worry that not enough is being done, and that there isn’t enough political will to help a group far behind the mainstream.

“We are concerned because it is a source of instability and tension in years to come,” said Nicolae Gheorghe of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Held back by racism, poverty and illiteracy, most of Europe’s Gypsies endure living conditions closer to those of sub-Saharan Africa, the United Nations concluded last year.

The stereotype of Gypsies as colorful nomads has largely faded. Most of Eastern Europe’s Gypsies were settled under communism and live largely on the periphery of society as the poorest of the poor.

Many never attend school. In the Czech Republic, half of those who do have been funneled into programs for the mentally deficient, according to the European Roma Rights Center.

Police harass them. Skinheads beat them. Often the courts fail to protect them. In Hungary, a judge ruled that two Gypsies jailed for 15 months on false murder charges should get reduced compensation because they were too “primitive” to have suffered during their incarceration.

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