Over 80,000 children still languish
in Romanian orphanages. This tragedy has received extensive media coverage
since the early 1990s, and the compassion of the world has turned toward
than. While documentation issued by various human rights groups (1),
and a small number of press reports (2) have acknowledged
the fact that in the majority of these state institutions as many as 80%
of the infants are Roma (Gypsies) this has still not made an impact upon
the mainstream American media.
Equally deserving of attention is the fact that while
the overall population of the children so incarcerated is of both Romani
and non-Romani origin, their respective presence in those institutions
today is the result of two very different policies. Ceausescu had specific
plans for the Roma, which were grimly reminiscent of the centuries of Gypsy
slavery in his country, not fully abolished until 1864. He also brought
techniques of genetic engineering - based specifically on the race
policies of Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany - into the 1980s, forty years
after the Holocaust in which the Roma were selected alongside the Jews
for complete extermination in the Final Solution (3).
Not one of the current affairs oriented television programs such as
Turning
Point, 60 minutes, 20/20 and others have even mentioned
this blatantly racist situation, even though all of them have broadcast
feature programs about these children. If eighty percent of those in the
orphanages were of specifically Hungarian, or Jewish, or Armenian descent,
for example, this would without question be cause for instant outrage and
investigation at the highest level. But those children are Gypsies and
we can only conclude therefore that they do not merit concern. Ironically,
some of those same programs have not hesitated to broadcast investigative
reports on crimes committed by Gypsies.
Roma in Romanian state institutions
The distinction between Gypsies and non-Gypsies has been particularly
apparent in the treatment of the children in those state institutions;
theirs is perhaps the most tragic aspect of the Romani situation in Romania.
While news of the existence of extraordinarily large numbers of children
in Romanian orphanages began to reach the West in 1990, the fact that most
of them are Gypsies is still not generally known. Although Romani Romanians
constitute only between 10% and 20% of the national population, they make
up as much as 80% of the children in many of these homes. Some are orphans,
but others have been voluntarily placed in foster homes and orphanages
by their parents, who maintain that they believe their children's chances
for survival in an increasingly hostile society would be greater in a state
institution than in the Romani community, which is under increasing attack.
In a number of these establishments, especially as one travels further
east in Romania, the children are given minimal routine care, and receive
no physical attention, sometimes being left bound in urine-soaked sheets
on the ground all day or tightly handcuffed to their beds. Many have open
sores because of this, and the arms and legs of others have become deformed.
Incidents of AIDS, hepatitis, and more recently cholera, have been reported,
the result of unsanitary equipment and blood transfusions. Because of a
lack of human love and contact during their first years of life, a frightening
number of the children have underdeveloped motor and communication skills;
some are unable to speak or walk or feel normal human emotions. Some are
filled with an excruciating rage which they don't understand and cannot
control.
The human rights organization Terre des Hommes in Den Haag reports
that the annual death rate in some of these homes is between 50% and 65%.
The policy of the Romanian government is to withhold the children from
being available for adoption for a period of six months after they are
born, ostensibly to allow their own parents, or other Romanian citizens,
to have first access to them. But white Romanians don't adopt Gypsy children,
and if their parents are living, they too seldom change their minds about
removing them from the institutions. Thus in their first six months of
life, according to the figures issued by Terre des Hommes, 25% and 32%
of the Gypsy babies perish because they are not made accessible to those
wishing
to adopt them.
Such children are classified as "irrecuperable" or
"irrecoverable" by the government, and no attempt is made to sustain them;
a film entitled Romania's death camps was broadcast nationally in
July, 1991 showing the mass graves where their bodies were dumped, not
even in boxes after they had been allowed to die. According to that report,
irrecuperables were sent to Riu Sadului (near Sibiu), "one of 170 isolated
'forbidden zones.' No visitors were allowed inside; one mile up the road
is a mass grave, four football fields long. Dutch humanitarian Hans Hunink
[working with Terre des Hommes) discovered the mass grave last winter.
Hunink believes that most of the dead are children." (4)
There are a number of reasons why the racial identity of the majority
of the Romanian orphans has not been better publicized. The greatest demand
among prospective adoptive parents in the United States is for white babies,
which are not readily available in American orphanages. A report circulated
by Touch Romania in Summer, 1991, stated that "[t]he great interest
in Romanian adoption, fueled in part by the media, centers around the fact
that the vast majority of the children in question are Caucasian." The
non-Caucasian Romani children (whose genetic descent is ultimately Dravidian)
in fact constitute the majority, but advertising this, it has been suggested,
would adversely affect business for the adoption agencies. It is also the
case that journalists reporting on the situation often approach it without
any prior knowledge of Romanian population demographics, or of the history
and identity of the Roma, and so make no special concession to the racial
aspects of the Romanian situation. It is also certainly true that Romani
children have not always been made available for adoption by the Romanian
authorities themselves. They are either kept out of the sight of visitors
to the homes, or those visitors are dissuaded from adopting them. A Mexican
American couple from Amarillo, Texas, told the Romani Union that when they
asked for a Romani child specifically because its complexion more closely
matched their own, they were refused, and asked why they would waste the
opportunity to grow up in America "on a Gypsy." Kathleen Hunt also reported
the same attitude from a staff member at the state institution at Ploiesti,
which she visited in January, 1991:
Half an hour later, Dr. Luiza Popescu strides in ... When [she is told
that a visitor] is looking for abandoned babies, she snickers that most
of those children are from the "baby machines," or Gypsies. "How could
Americans be willing to adopt Gypsies?," the doctor asks, voicing the prejudice
many ethnic Romanians harbor. "The genetics is what matters from the beginning,"
she declares with a sweep of the hand. "Ha! Such a child will certainly
steal." (5)
Reasons for the Romanian situation
The Gypsy children in the Romanian institutions are
the result of Nicolae Ceausescu's plan to create a superior "Dacian" people
by selective breeding and population engineering. Ceausescu's fascination
with Hitler's racial policies is no secret; "In the early 1970s, when Ceausescu
learned that Romania had over 600,000 emigrés abroad, he became
very interested in Hitler's Fifth Column. That was not too surprising,
as Ceausescu had always studied Hitler's 'charisma,' and had repeatedly
analyzed the original Nazi films of Hitler's speeches ... In almost every
speech, he recalls the Romanian people's origins in proud Roman and Dacian
warriors, just as Hitler harped on the Aryans..."(6)
Because he took pains to conceal his actions, however, and little documentation
to substantiate them has so far come to light, the means by which he tried
to accomplish his aims are only now being pieced together. The establishment
of his "death camp" orphanages apparently pre-dated his open fascination
with Hitler by some years:
Ceausescu started the camps as early as 1965. There
had been years of planning. When Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp,
was discovered in January 1945, Nicolae Ceausescu was 27 years old. Like
the Nazis, Ceausescu advocated racial purity. Years later, he would express
his concern for, quote, "the new human type we intend to mold in our society."
Ceausescu had Romania's history books rewritten. He argued that the true
Romanians were descended from Dacians, far more advanced than what he called
the other "aboriginal" races ... "superior even to ancient Rome." Ceausescu
wanted a huge robot work force. (7)
His intention was to breed on the one hand large
numbers of "pure" Romanians and on the other, those who were to make up
his "robot work force," the status Roma had endured as slaves for 550 years
(8).
In both cases, like the ancient Spartans, the weak were allowed to die,
since they were of no use to either population. Women, married or not,
were encouraged to have many children; they were rewarded publicly for
having five or more, and birth control was made illegal. Romanian officials
maintain that Roma were not therefore discriminated against since this
policy affected them equally (9). The difference, however,
lay in what was destined for each group. Because of the state of the Romanian
economy, and the execution of Ceausescu in December, 1989, this bizarre
plan was never to materialize, but it has left a legacy in the surplus
children who languish in the Romanian orphanages and whose bodies fill
the mass graves reported by Terre des Hommes. That Roma are treated as
subhuman in modern Romania, where the very word Tsigan ("Gypsy,"
but synonymous with "slave" in the Romanian language), is the result of
centuries of persecution rooted in Romanian history.
Notes
(1) See Theodore Zang, et al., eds., Destroying
Ethnic Identity: The Persecution of Gypsies in Romania (New York:
Helsinki Watch (Human Rights Watch), 1991), Veronika L. Szente, Sudden
Rage at Dawn: Violence Against Roma in Romania (Budapest: European
Roma Rights Center, Country Reports Series No. 2, 1996), Prospects for
Roma in a New Europe, Helsinki Committee of the Romani Union Special
Report, Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Moscow, 1991
and Ian Hancock, "Rapport au Comité Américain des Droits
de l'Homme sur la Situation des Roma en Roumanie," Etudes Tsiganes,
3:12-14 (1991). Back
(2) See Dan Pavel, "Romania's hidden victims,"
New
Republic, March 4th, 1991, pp. 12-13, Kathleen Hunt, "Romania's lost
children," The New York Times Magazine, June 24th, 1990, pp. 28-36,
Ruth Sorelle, "Bom to be forgotten," The Houston Chronicle Special
Report, April 28th, 1996, Toby Sonneinan, "Romania's forgotten children,"
The
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 30th, 1991, pp. A9-A10, the same
author's "Romania's Gypsy children,"
Lies of Our Times, June, 1991,
pp. 16-17, and her "Gypsies in eastern Europe: Why we should care,"
Humanistic
Judaism, July, 1991, pp. 47-49. Back
(3) See Ian Hancock, "Responses to the Porrajmos: The
Romani Holocaust," in Alan Rosenbaum (ed.), Is the Holocaust Unique?
Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, Boulder: The Westview Press,
1996, pp. 39-64. Back
(4) Mark Jones, "Romania's death camps," on NBC's cable
network program The Real Story, broadcast on Cable News Network
on Sunday, July 28th, 1991. Back
(5) Kathleen Hunt, "The Romanian baby bazaar,"
The
New York Times Magazine, March 24th, 1991, pp. 24-29, on p. 26. Back
(6) Ion Mihai Pacepa, Red Horizons, Washington:
Regnery Gateway, 1991, p. 281. See also Edward Behr, Kiss the Hand You
Cannot Bite, New York: Villard Books, 1991, especially Chapter 2, pp.
29-48. Back
(7) Mark Jones, op. cit. Back
(8) Ian Hancock, The
Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution, Ann
Arbor: Karoma Publishers, 1987. For the Asian origins of the Romani people,
see the introductory chapter in the same author's A Handbook of Vlax
Romani, Columbus: Slavica Publishers, 1995. Back
(9) Its application, however, did not match this claim,
since Romani mothers received no such recognition. Back