As Hungary completes a fifth year of painful restructuring, the economic and social diagnosis for Roma is increasingly desperate. The most immediate and dramatic threat to Roma comes from attacks and harassment by racist hate groups. For the meantime, less visible patterns of endemic discrimination and increasing social marginalization pose an equally serious danger for Hungary's largest minority.
The major social and structural upheavals in Hungarian society since the collapse of communism, coupled with increasingly open discrimination, have had a disproportionately large and negative impact on Roma, whose low social status, lack of access to education, and isolation make them relatively unable to defend themselves and their interests. Reforms initiated by Hungarian politicians have often been undertaken without considering their devastating impact on the country's Roma. Roma suffer nearly total marginalization within Hungarian society: they are almost entirely absent from the visible political, academic, commercial, and social life of the country.
Roma have borne the heaviest burdens in the economic restructuring that has followed the transition to a market economy. They were the first to be fired from their jobs in 1989 and 1990, and many have been unemployed since. Unemployment among Roma is more than 60 percent; outside of relatively prosperous Budapest, areas with nearly 100 percent unemployment among Roma are not uncommon. Unemployment rates for the entire country, including the high figures for Roma, are about 13 percent. Roma comprise 5-6 percent of the current population of Hungary.
Roma suffer discrimination in schools and in the general community. Only a handful of Roma graduate from, or even attend, academic high schools. Barely half of all Roma finish primary school; a large percentage of those have received most of their education in "remedial" classes and schools in which very few Hungarian children are placed. Most urban Roma live in ghettoized slums, or in the worst housing projects; in the countryside, they live on "Gypsy rows," orincreasingly, in separate, all-Roma villages. Many public establishments exclude Roma, often quite openly.
Economic hardship and freedom of expression have led many Hungarians to become increasingly willing to voice negative opinions about Roma; people are less reluctant to state openly anti-Roma views and/or to support government policies or individual actions that directly or indirectly focus on "bringing the Roma into line." Roma complain of an "everyday racism" that colors all of their relations with the majority Hungarian population.
Roma are frequently victims of community violence: many are routinely subjected to harassment and intimidation by skinheads and other extremist elements of society; many have been subjected to physical attack, or to the threat of physical attack. After peaking in 1991, skinhead attacks on Roma and other minorities declined; in the spring of 1995, however, local human rights monitoring groups reported a sudden jump in the number of attacks, perhaps signaling a renewed campaign of anti-Roma violence. Many of the attacks in recent years have involved not only the acquiescence of local police, but even their active involvement. The national government has consistently denied the existence of racial violence in the country.
There are areas of progress: Roma, like other Hungarian citizens, enjoy new political freedom to form groups and associations, and the number of Roma organizations has grown consistently since 1989. Open expression of Roma cultural and ethnic identity is no longer officially discouraged. President Árpád Göncz has proposed legislation that would specifically address discrimination against Roma, although only the portion dealing with the criminal code has as yet been adopted. Additionally, there have been several potentially important political initiatives by the government since the end of 1995 - including the formation of a Roma Program Commission in the Parliament, as well as a public foundation and a coordinating council to deal with the effects of the economic and political transition of the Roma community. However, these initiatives are not unambiguously positive developments, and to date, they have produced no concrete programs or results [see section on The Legal Situation of Roma - Abuses under the New Minority Law, below].
Perhaps the single most important development in the past two and one-half years is the establishment of a system of minority self-government for Hungary's thirteen recognized minorities, including the Roma. The Law on Rights of National and Ethnic Minorities, passed in July 1993, proposed an ambitious and progressive system of minority rights, including the election of local and national councils, or self-governments, with authority over the cultural, linguistic, and educational concerns of the respective minorities. Elections for the local self-governments were held in late 1994, and the national assemblies were formed in early 1995.
However, the new minorities system has largely failed to deliver on its promise. The self-governments are only nominally funded and are completely dependent on the local Hungarian councils. There is strong evidence that the government interfered with the election of the national Roma self-government, effectively violating the autonomy it had just granted to its largest minority.
Many observers believe the law's real purpose was to bolster Hungary's foreign policy goals and image in the West and that there was never any real commitment to improving the situation of minorities, especially Roma, within the country. It is perhaps telling that, in the first draft of the legislation creating the new self-government system, Roma were not on the list of protected minorities; only after vociferous protests did the Parliament include them.
Many Roma feel that the promises of democratic political reform, so strong in 1989, have amounted to very little for them. The initial interest that some of the liberal, Western-oriented parties showed in minority affairs has largely been jettisoned in the face of widespread hostility from the majority Hungarian populace. Roma remain on the periphery - isolated, despised, and denied effective participation in the process that is shaping the new Hungary and the role of minorities within it.