Talk:Roma in Bulgaria

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Is Toma Tomov a politician or an athlete?

[edit] Problems of exclusion and discrimination

I have added a new section with this title. I have covered education in enough detail, I think, but it would certainly be useful to expand the section with more info on housing and unemployment, perhaps health too.

Moreover, I haven't touched the subject of racist and police violence yet. The European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) has published extensively about this - use the country and theme search boxes in their archive, but the Council of Europe has admonished Bulgaria about this too. In fact, last year the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found Bulgaria liable for police abuse of Roma on two separate occasions. So the topic should be mentioned as well.

No-itsme 18:44, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Yep, feel free to expand the article as long as you cite reliable sources like the ones you've used until now and the ones mentioned above. Personally, I don't think Bulgaria should be blamed for all those things mentioned, as the Roma themselves are themselves responsible for many of their own problems, but a section on these issues is certainly totally relevant and, what's more, absolutely necessary. Todor→Bozhinov 18:50, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Todor, and also thank you very much for reformatting the second and third footnotes to the same resource! I hadnt picked up on that convention yet, and have now gone back to make the same correction to an addition I made to another entry as well. No-itsme 19:07, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Always glad to help :) Todor→Bozhinov 19:51, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The official position of the Bulgarian government

I still think, these the two passages

"ECRI has correctly observed that members of the Roma community encounter “serious difficulties” “in many spheres of life”. [...] Consequently, this allegation of ECRI is also erroneous."[8]

and

"There had never been a policy of "segregation" of Roma children in the national education system. [...] the word “segregation" with respect to Roma children is inaccurate."[11]

should be removed or paraphrased and definitely be shortened.

They are citations containing other citations from a "Skopje Report" I could not retrieve from the Internet. This causes confusion. If there is a copy of this "Skopje Report" on the net and if the citations relate to the situation of the Roma in Bulgaria it should be cited directly.

Regarding the "official position" it is also important, who defines this position; definitely not the Roma ;-) (see the paragraph I added to the article).

Anilomes 07:36, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

I agree that the citations are overly long and at places unclear. However, this topic is very sensitive and any paraphrasing, deleting, or partial citations can be interpreted as biased editing. For myself, I cannot take the responsibility to giving my view about this question. As per the Wiki NPOV article WP:NPOV, what must be done in this case is to give all views to a problem, pointing to the side which holds the particular opinion, and avoid taking any side, trying to stay neutral. If I paraphrase, edit, or give any opinion, this will be already my POV. All the more, that cited documents are official, have legal status, and are binding to a country, in this case Bulgaria. As for the Skopje report, it is indeed necessary to include it, once cited, and I am searching for it. It is probably minutes of a conference. And why do you state that Roma do not define the official position? Roma parties are well represented in the Bulgarian parliament, so they partake in every decision which cannot be said for many other countries, not only in Eastern Europe.

As for the cited material, the data are 10 years old. And there are also controversies. On the one hand, it is alleged that ethnic parties are not allowed, while on the other hand, it says that Roma parties failed to win elections for Parliament. BTW, one of the parties in the ruling coalition in Bulgaria at present is ethnic Turk which won elections to a large part due to votes coming from Turkey. Personally, I do not know another country in Europe in which a minority party is in power.

This report of POLITEA is also cited selectively in the new paragraph by failing to mention what it writes for the period after 2001, the participation of parties like EuroRoma in free elections and the reasons why they did not win more representatives (not suppression by government but heterogeity of Roma population, as the report says). The ECRI report was also cited selectively so it gives a red flag that this article (or particular sections of it) is written to serve some agenda (changing the constitution by non-parliamentary means?). This led me to an interesting question: Does the U.S. Constitution allow ethnic parties? Lantonov 08:06, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Update: I found the Skopje report easily in Google. See it cited in the respective place in the article. It is not always positive for Bulgaria but as far as it gives space for diverging opinions, it sounds objective. Lantonov 10:03, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for retrieving the "Skopje Report", I will read it. I started to cite more from the POLITEA document. We should try to get a balance and find more recent sources.

"Personally, I do not know another country in Europe in which a minority party is in power."

In Germany, for example, there is a party of the Danish Minority in Northern Germany. And they have the status of a "national minority" just Roma, Sinti, Sorbs etc. Bulgarian Law does not provide this status, which is IMHO part of the problem.

"Roma parties are well represented in the Bulgarian parliament..."

I cannot see, that they are "well represented". Euroroma did not make it into the National Assembly and the others got one seat from the "big parties" as it looks. I can only see, that the Bulgarian Turks are well represented although their party is not explicitely ethnic.

Anilomes 12:01, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Your recent changes, indeed, are well balanced. Euroroma participated in the 2005 elections in coalition with BSP which won a majority in the National Assembly (the whole coalition). There are at least 2 MPs of Euroroma in Parliament now: Toma Tomov and Tsvetelin Tsvetkov. I am almost sure that there are more but have to find a list of MPs to tell names. Do they have a Roma or Turkish party in Germany? Do you know countries in which they have explicitly Roma parties in Parliament? As for national minorities, Roma and Turks are long ago officially given status of the largest (and increasing proportionally) minorities in Bulgaria. Which Bulgarian law forbids this status? Lantonov 12:34, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

The Danish minority party in Germany interested me, so I found the following citation:

"The differences begin with the political histories of the two, which have been strongly divergent since the Franco-Prussian wars. In their effect upon the present situation only the political events of the past half-century will be considered here. 1945, the end of WW II, marked a turning point in the history of both communities: for the German Danes it meant a sudden drop from supreme status and power into national disgrace and stigma, for the Danish German cause a rise to power, popularity and unprecedented attractiveness, accompanied by a surge in consciousness, ethnic identity, language use and prestige of Danish south of the border. The very opposite happened to German in the north, with concomitant increases and decreases, respectively, in membership. The 'Kieler Erklärung' of 1949 further supported the Danish movement in North Germany; the demise of the German Danes in North Schleswig was not halted by similar assurances until the restoration of German sovereignty and its momentous economic recovery, which made possible the 1955 declarations 'equalizing' both minorities. For the German minority in Denmark, however, the losses were irrecoverable; for the German Danish minority Germany's rise to prominence meant a certain reduction to its committed core population. Still, the Danish minority party has managed to surpass the 5% clause and still maintains at least one representative at the supra-regional government level; the corresponding German party in Denmark has lost its seat."

Differences between Danish Party and Euroroma:

1. Danish party has 1+ representative, Euroroma has 2+ representatives.
2. Danish party passed the 5% barrier, Euroroma could not pass the 4% barrier, so it used a main party (BSP) as a carrier to put MPs in Parliament. Lantonov 13:22, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Euroroma won 1.25 % and is not represented in the parliament, as you can see from the page of the "Tsentralen Izbiratelen Komitet". The Danish Party in Germany is a mere example for a ethnic party in a democratic country. You cannot compare them to the Roma minority in Bulgaria, because they are a much smaller group (max. 50.000 of a population of 80.000.000, i.e. 0,00625 percent) and not 5 to 10 percent.

Of course, everybody with a German passport can found and become member of a party. There is no Turkish party, because most Turks do not have the German citizenship (unlike the Roma in Bulgaria), but German Turks would be free to found their own party (very dubious statement - how can they found a party in Germany when they are not German citizens? Lantonov 11:08, 21 September 2007 (UTC)), this is democracy.

But at the moment, I think it is more important for this article to gather more facts.

PS: a list of all MPs you can find on the page of the BG parliament.

Anilomes 14:28, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Turks in Germany do not have citizenship because Germany refuses to grant them citizenship status exactly because it does not want to accept them as a minority. Not having citizenship, they do not have a right to vote, neighter a right to found a party or participate in politics in any other way. There are more Turks permanently living in Germany than there are in Bulgaria. Compare the situation with Bulgaria, in which Turks won half of their seats in Parliament by votes driven with buses from Turkey of people with double Bulgarian-Turkish citizenship. If the Danish minority is 0,00625%, how did they win 5% of all the votes in Germany?

As for Roma MPs, read carefully the POLITEIA report. "Evroroma managed to get a vote share of 1.25 percent, which should secure it some state support and help it develop as a political organization of the Roma minority." For the "vote share of 1.25%", do a simple math. BG Parliament has 240 seats. 240 * 1.25% = 3 seats for Euroroma. There is another Roma Party, Free Bulgaria, also in coalition with BSP which has 1 seat. I told you the names of 2 Roma MPs, for the other 2 I must consult the list. Another Roma Party, DROM, participated in another coalition together with Gergyovden, that also won a Roma seat in Parliament, with MP Manush Romanov, who has been a Roma deputy for many years. So there are 4 or 5 Roma representatives in the 40th Parliament, which is now in power. Roma wouldn't win seats in Parliament if not in coalition because it could not pass 4% barrier (which in Germany is 5%), as the POLITEIA report says. Sorry but the large Roma minority in Bulgaria does not trust Roma politicians and votes for Bulgarian parties in elections. How can Roma politicians remedy the situation? Maybe import Roma votes from abroad as the Turks did. Lantonov 05:42, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

The text in the Bulgarian Constitution is: "It is not allowed to form political parties on ethnic, racist, or religious basis, as well as parties who aim usurping the government by non-parliamentary and violent means." This means that one cannot found a party whose members can only be Roma and Bulgarians are not accepted in it, or the opposite, a Bulgarian party that does not accept Roma members. The principle of the party must be something else. For example, the Turkish party is not called "Turkish party" but "Movement for rights and freedoms". It is not founded on ethnic principles but on liberal centrist ideology. It is even a member of the Liberal International. It is open to all ethnicities and in fact in recent years it accepted as members a number of prominent politicians of Bulgarian ethnicity which it put on high position in central and regional government. However, as we see, Roma in Bulgaria are not united in their political views and support parties with divergent political aims. Lantonov 06:21, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

I couldn't find a list of MPs with their party membership in the page of the Bulgarian Parliament. Lantonov 07:17, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Here you can find all of them [1]

Anilomes 08:42, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Number of Roma representatives in BG parliament

"At the 2005 elections, this trend continued. The BSP alliance run Tomov on their lists, the ODS alliance included another Roma organization, DROM, and Evroroma ran alone, failing to win representation in Parliament. As a result, there is currently only 1 Roma representative in the Bulgarian Parliament."

Please see the above citation from the POLITEA source, which is used here for determining the number of Roma MPs in the current Bulgarian parliament. It cannot be used as a proof that there are 4 MPs of Roma origin. I have to reapeat that (judging from the sources I studied) Euroroma is not in the parliament.

Anilomes 08:34, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

From the three Roma MPs mentioned in the previous topic of the discussion, I could find only Mr Tomov on the official site of the BG parliament. There is no Mr Tsvetkov and no Mr Romanov.

Anilomes 09:15, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

There is no party belonging on the list but you are right - there are no such names there. So let us leave 1 representative unless proven otherwise. Lantonov 16:10, 27 September 2007 (UTC)