Romani people have been persecuted and discriminated against for centuries all across Europe. The centuries-old resentments against the various Romani peoples across Europe peaked during the Holocaust in the 1940s, when approximately half a million Romani people were murdered in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and other fascist puppet states of the Nazi regime. Today’s Republic of Croatia used to be one of these puppet states. In the so-called “Independent State of Croatia” led by the fascist leader Ante Pavelić an estimated number of 29,000 Romani people were among thousands of other Serbs and Jews exterminated to achieve the goal of an ethnically “cleansed” Croatia.
According to the most recent census of 2011, there are currently about 17,000 Romani people living in Croatia; however, this is unlikely to closely reflect the real number, as many Romani people living in Croatia either don’t hold Croatian citizenship or omit their cultural background. It is estimated that up to a quarter of the Romani people in Croatia are still “stateless”. To this day, a majority of Romani people live in segregation and relative poverty. For example, until the late 1990s most Romani children had to attend separate schools, which had considerably worse quality than their Croatian counterparts and a recent poll showed that about 40% of the Croatian population is still prejudiced against people of Romani origin. Additionally, Romani people, including children, repeatedly find themselves victims of violent hate crimes, an example being an incident in 2016 when unidentified attackers threw a grenade at a Romani preschool in Zagreb. All these things prove that while the worst times for the Romani community in Croatia might be in the past, there is still a long way to go to achieve social and economic inclusion. However, there is a silver lining. Together with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the local Legal Information Centre is currently in the process of providing all Romani people in Croatia with citizenship. By becoming citizens, thousands of people could gain access to social and housing benefits and could thereby get their foot on the first step of the ladder to climb out of poverty and exclusion and into mainstream society and economic prosperity. Nonetheless, in order for the entire situation of the Romani people in Croatia to really improve, the government and the EU need to play a much more active role in preventing the hardships of today from becoming the hardships of tomorrow.
European London 