Another point of view

A response to the article below from a real live Hungarian pal o' mine (with some Romany ancestry, mind you):

yeah, there are problems with integrating the Roma minority in Eastern Europe, and sure, there is a sense of prejudice against them. But i don't think it is any different from the prejudice against blacks in US, Subcontinentals in UK or North Africans in France. And the economical/social status and resources of those countries can not be compared to those of Hungary, Romania or Czech Rep. So i think it is hardly surprising that we in the poor east fail to deal with it. The article claims that they are the least cared for/most oppressed minority in the western world (well if that includes eastern europe). i don't think it is that much worse than the situation of other minorities. It is always extremely difficult to find an ideal solution, ever more so on the fringes of Europe (let alone other continents) and there is no viable advice or example to follow from anywhere else in the world really.

The Hungarian Guard (bunch of neo-Nazi lunatics) is probably as grave a threat as the present-day KKK and definitely incomparably smaller than the BNP. I would much more worry about that subdued but default prejudice in the average person.

Plus the writer tends to suggest that there is a Roma culture that the whole Roma society of a country accepts as their own. Well, i can tell you that 90% of the Gypsies in my area couldn't care less about tradition and culture. They have no desire to learn their own language (the school where my mother teaches has a program for that, free of charge of course), play their own music (not a single Gypsy musician in a 20-mile radius of Zabar) or indeed claim a proud Roma identity that goes beyond not being hungarian (a "peasant" as they refer to hungarians). So, again there are problems, and the country is struggling to come up with a plan to help Romas integrate better into society, but there are no templetes as how to do that.

The article does a great job at taking the moral high-ground of the sophisticated Western West and talking down the efforts of the Ministry of Culture to give a platform to Gypsy artists to represent themselves - what's wrong with trying? The commercial tv-channels, which the writer quotes as good examples do as much harm as good. Sure the Hungarian Idol was won by a gypsy guy a year ago but they also have a top-of-the-ratings reality show broadcasting the life of a truly despicable human being (let's say a male Paris Hilton of Hungary) who happens to be gypsy (and thus the face of the Roma in the eyes of many). That surely hurts the cause of improving the perception of the majority more than what the Gypsy Hungarian Idol did to help.
The fact that the Roma politicians and leaders of ngo-groups are up to level with the hungarians in corruption doesn't help either. (why wouldn't they be though right?) One sad example is the case of the Austrian government's program of paying retributions to victims of the Roma Holocaust that was turned into a complete fiasco by the leaders of Roma NGOs. It led to the program being shut down and the Austrians sueing the NGOs - that money could have been used to maintain so many arts camps for gypsy kids like the one the article laments was shut down due to lack of money.
Of course Hungary is a country where even an NGO that is supposed to help kids with cancer manages to embezzle charity money...

I guess Hungary is just a disfunctional country. So the reason why the article irritates me is that it takes one problem and presents it as if it were unique. Which it is not; not in the micro-cosmos of hungary & eastern europe and not in the larger-scale minority issues of the Western world.