Post-Communism Romani Migration to Canada

Director of Advocacy,

Roma Community & Advocacy Centre,

Toronto, Canada

2000

This article discusses the recent migration of Romani refugee claimants to Canada from the Czech Republic and Hungary, with the intent of showing that while Romani migration to Canada is nothing new, this migration differs from previous ones in that the immigrants have publicly identified themselves as Roma, and this has resulted in their being given a different reception from that of the historical migrants. The Gypsy stereotype, media sensationalism, and public fear of refugees has combined to make things more difficult for these Roma than for previous groups of Roma who arrived in Canada. After giving an historic overview of Romani migration to Canada, this paper will analyse the public and government reaction to the 1997 arrival of the Czech Roma, and the subsequent arrival of the Hungarian Roma. The discussion addresses the influence of the media, the Gypsy stereotype, entrenched racism, and influential organisations and individuals from the refugee’s home country on immigration policy. While this paper focuses mainly on Canadian policy toward, and treatment of, the Roma refugees, it is also international in scope in that it provides evidence that economic and political relations between Canada and the refugee-producing countries affect the policy toward refugees.

While there have been Roma in Canada since the 1890’s, as the following historical overview will discuss, most mainstream Canadians have been unaware of their existence. Canadian immigration was also unaware of the existence of earlier Romani arrivals, admitting them along with other immigrants from their countries of origin, or among general refugees from Communism. Since 1997, however, Romani refugees to Canada have received a great deal of attention in the media, and Canadian Immigration has treated them differently from previous Romani immigrants and refugees. The reasons for this are the subject of this paper. After an historic overview of Romani migration to Canada, which serves as background for the central points of this paper, the bulk of the paper discusses the interaction of media presentation, public opinion, and immigration policy in the case of the Romani refugees from the Czech Republic. The final section discusses the current situation of the Hungarian Roma refugee claimants in Canada, pointing out how it differs from that of the Romani refugees from the Czech Republic.

Romani immigration to Canada began in the last decade of the 19^th century as part of the mass migration of Vlach Roma from eastern Europe and the Balkans which eventually reached the United States, Central and South America and Canada. These first Roma immigrants constituted a related collection of clans, speaking mutually-intelligible dialects of Romani and following a very similar and highly-traditional culture. They were part of the Danubian Romani group, which included the former Romani slaves of Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania who were only officially emancipated in the Romanian Principalities in 1864. After this date, large numbers migrated to other regions of the Balkans, central and western Europe and finally, to the Americas, Australia and elsewhere.

These earliest Vlach-Romani immigrants entered Canada as a small group, lost among the large number of non-Romani homesteaders from eastern Europe who came to Canada in the late 19^th and early 20th centuries, as the result of a Canadian government scheme to settle the prairie provinces. Immigrants were offered free land providing they were willing to clear the timber and build permanent dwellings in order to populate the sparsely-inhabited western regions after the Métis Rebellion of 1885. This original group of Vlach Roma, was soon joined by another group which trekked up to Canada from Argentina via Mexico and the United States. These two groups intermarried and were later joined by more Vlach Romani immigrants from the United States and Europe until the First World War when immigration from Europe to Canada was suspended. There is no indication that these original Romani immigrants to Canada were identified specifically as Roma by the Canadian Immigration authorities. Canadian Immigration has always listed immigrants by nationality and not by ethnic identity. While some of these original Roma did settle on homesteads in Alberta for a brief initial period, they soon sold their land and became commercial nomads, travelling with horse-drawn wagons and working as metal smiths and horse traders while their women hawked items and told fortunes in the rural areas of eastern Canada where they relocated.

The second historical group of Romani immigrants to Canada came from Britain and was beginning to become established in Canada by the second decade of the 20^th century. These British-Romani Travellers arrived with British passports and had commonplace British surnames. They were identified as British immigrants rather than "Gypsies" by Canadian Immigration officials. They too were mostly commercial nomads and also travelled throughout eastern Canada, working mainly as horse traders, showmen and peddlers. Prior to the First World War, some Romani families of Sinti and Romungere arrived in Canada from Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the war, they were incarcerated in internment camps as enemy aliens along with the non-Romani immigrants from their former countries; their horses, wagons and goods were confiscated and after the war most of them returned to their former countries or migrated to the United States.

Between the two World Wars, Romani immigration continued from Britain and the United States. Immigration from the rest of Europe was insignificant. With the advent of mechanisation, Roma and Romanitchels became less visible in the rural areas when they joined the carnivals which travelled mainly by train across Canada and the US. By the time the Second World War broke out, Canadian Vlach-Roma, like their American counterparts, were beginning to settle in the towns and cities. Romanitchels continued to travel but with cars, trucks and house trailers and both groups really became invisible to the Canadian public. Canadian Roma, like their American counterparts, were able to disappear into the urban centres where they were developed a culture of invisibility in these cosmopolitan environments. This soon resulted in the widespread myth of their non-existence among the American and Canadian public in general. The Vlach-Roma became chameleons, following the Romani adage of: Rom le Romensa tai Gazhó le Gazhensa – Romani among fellow Roma and a Gadjo among non-Roma.

The third large group of Roma to migrate to Canada was composed of sedentary Hungarian Romungere, mainly of the Bashaldé or Musician group who arrived as refugees, lost among the mass of non-Romani Hungarian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of 1956. These original Romungere refugees later sponsored relatives and spouses once they became Canadian citizens and developed a viable community in Canada. After the establishment of Communist governments in eastern Europe and the Balkans, anyone from a communist country could theoretically apply for refugee status in Canada and Roma simply entered as Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, Bulgarians and Yugoslavs among the non-Romani refugees from their former countries. There was no need for them to claim refugee status as Roma. Since Canada is a signatory to the UN Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees of 1951, anyone claiming Convention-refugee status under the rules of the Convention as accepted by Canada has been eligible to apply. During the Communist era, a considerable of nomadic Vlach-Roma managed to gain entry to Canada as nationals of their former countries. As well as nomadic Roma who were fleeing the repressive communist laws forbidding Romani nomadism, there were also some Romani intellectuals and leaders who had worked for Romani organisations in communist countries who had been targeted as reactionaries by the secret police.

In May 1973, one large group of nomadic Lovara, originally from Yugoslavia, arrived in Montreal on a Russian ship from France along with their automobiles and house trailers. They camped in Ville Brossard on the South Shore of Montreal and all the males of the group over 16 years of age were detained by Canadian Immigration after the Romani "tourists" attempted to cross the American border at Plattsburg. N.Y. The Montreal Vlach-Romani community, under the leadership of George Demitro, who was then the Baró or local Vlach-Romani leader, arranged for the group to obtain the services of an expert immigration lawyer. This was the first time that a group of Roma had arrived as refugees and had become identified as such and the resulting press coverage foreshadowed the 1997 arrival of the Czech-Romani refugees. Because of this press coverage, this group of about sixty people soon became the focus of a conflict between the Federal Government Immigration Department and the Separatist Provincial Government of René Levesque, then the Premier of Quebec, who defended their right to remain in Quebec. At this time, Quebec was flexing its political muscle with Ottawa over the issue of more provincial control over immigration. Apart from being a sensitive immigration issue between the Quebec Separatists and the Federal Government of Canada, the Roma refugees gained a lot of local support from various influential individuals and organisations. The end result was that some remained in Canada as landed immigrants while others managed to slip across the border into the US to join their relatives, who were already established in the Chicago area. However, since most of the media reports were in French, the issue did not become national and was contained within the province of Quebec.

This case was unusual because it involved two entire clans of Lovara Roma, the Burgyeshti and the Beshentsuri. Because the Roma arrived with their vehicles and the women wore the traditional long skirts and bandannas of the Vlach-Roma, they were immediately identified as Roma by Canadian Immigration. This resulted in a right-wing reaction from some journalists and politicians about the dangers of "Gypsy criminality." Despite the support of Premier Levesque, members of the long-established fascist movement in Quebec, which had historically supported Franco during the Spanish Civil War and which tried to prevent Jewish refugees from entering Quebec (and Canada) in the late 1930s, tried their best to run a smear campaign in the right-wing press to have the Roma deported.

Other groups of nomadic Roma also arrived in Montreal, during this period. Most came by plane and instead of arriving in one large group like the Yugoslavian Lovara, they arrived in small family groups and entered Canada as nationals of their countries of origin. How many Roma entered Canada during the Communist era is not known but there are now sizeable Romani communities who have migrated from the former Soviet Union, Poland, Rumania, the former Yugoslavia, Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia.

When the Communist governments of eastern Europe came to an end, the citizens of these former Communist countries could no longer request Convention-refugee status in Canada as refugees fleeing communism. Some of these countries, like the Czech Republic under Vaclav Havel, Poland and Hungary, for example, were hailed by the Canadian media as outstanding examples of new democracies. Other former communist countries, ex-Yugoslavia for example, continued to produce refugees because of the break up of the state. Ethnic and religious refugees continued to be accepted because of ethnic cleansing, persecution and other reasons. Roma who were now forced to flee these former communist countries because of systemic discrimination and the rise of neo-Nazi groups, fear of skinhead violence, ethnic cleansing and overt persecution at the hands of governments and the police in many countries, were now also forced to make a claim based on their Romani ethnicity when they applied for asylum in other countries. Roma who fled to western Europe soon found that these countries were reluctant to accept many Roma and some, like Germany, made agreements to ship Rumanian Roma refugees back to Rumania. Some countries like Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden did accept Convention refugees but Roma were not the preferred claimants and were often deported. Roma then went back to their countries of origin where they warned their peers of the dangers involved in trying to seek Convention- refugee status in western Europe. Some Roma from the former communist countries learned that Canada was also a country where they could claim Convention-refugee status and a trickle of Roma from many countries began arriving here stating on their arrival that they were Roma fleeing ethnic persecution This now created a problem for the Canadian Immigration Department since Roma claiming to be victims of ethnic persecution were a new group of refugees and the conditions they were fleeing were unfamiliar to Canadian Immigration officials. Persecution of a minority group on ethnic grounds is , however, a valid reason for a refugee claim and as long as the numbers of Roma refugees remained low, Canadian Immigration processed their cases individually while they slowly gathered background information on the conditions of Roma in the countries the refugees were fleeing.

As long as the numbers of Romani refugee claimants remained insignificant in relation to the total number of all Convention-refugee claimants, and no public attention was focused on the matter, the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) could simply deal with the individual cases, as they are obliged to do under the Convention, without having to consider such matters as the implications for the country of origin, and public reaction based on the "gypsy" stereotype. In effect, a small handful of Romani applicants for Convention-refugee status were accepted for processing, because, as of yet, nobody apart from their lawyers, the IRB judges and refugee claims officers were aware of this trickle. However, the 'secret' was spreading through the Romani grapevine and more and more Roma started to arrive in Canada.

The prelude to the influx of Czech-Romani refugees began in 1996 when a total of roughly 150 Czech- Romani claimants arrived in Vancouver between the early fall and Christmas after being told they were not welcome in Canada by francophone officials of Canadian Immigration when they landed in Montreal. At this time, the Czech Republic and Hungary were the only two former Communist countries whose citizens did not need a visa to travel to Canada. Czech Roma were thus able to buy a return ticket to Canada and, on arrival, apply for Convention-refugee status at the point of entry. While this small influx of Czech Roma received a lot of local publicity in the Vancouver area, mainly because of the involvement of Miss Julia Lovell, a young Romani activist, it did not make national headlines. The Vancouver media seemed mostly interested in creating a hometown celebrity out of Julia Lovell, because of her devoted efforts to help the Roma refugees find shelter, clothing, furniture and other help after their arrival. Unfortunately, this media coverage alerted certain hate mongers that "gypsies" were arriving in Canada which resulted in anonymous telephone threats to Julia Lovell’s life followed by an incident where persons unknown spray-painted swastikas and Nazi slogans all over her van. The media , of course, was not responsible but it was unwise of them to pinpoint the location of Ms. Lovell’s house which was hardly a prerequisite of the story.

On August 6, 1997, a documentary entitled Na Vlastni Oci (In Your Own Eyes) was aired in the Czech Republic by the private TV Nova. This had been filmed in the Toronto area in the summer of 1997 for the Current Affairs section and consisted of interviews with a few Czech-Romani refugee claimants and their Czech-speaking Canadian immigration lawyer. The slapdash coverage by the Czech journalists who glorified the carefree life the Romani asylum seekers were enjoying in Canada, living off the fat of the land, while ignoring the obstacles the refugees would face , gave a false picture. It suggested to the prospective Romani refugees that all they had to do was to fly to Canada and their problems would be over and that Canada would be waiting with open arms to receive them. This triggered a mass migration of Czech Roma who could afford the flight from the Czech Republic to Canada.

In all, about 1500 Czech-Romani claimants decided to try and obtain refugee status in Canada between August 1997, after the TV Nova documentary was aired, and October 8, 1997, when the visa restriction for Czech nationals was re-imposed which effectively ended the migration. They were of course, mostly the better-educated middle-class elite who had small businesses or assets they could sell to raise money for the trip. Many were members of ROI (Romska Obcanska Iniciativa) The exact number who actually attempted to migrate will probably never be known since some returned before or immediately after making a claim, others were persuaded to go back by immigration officials at Pearson International Airport in Toronto when they first arrived, and an unknown number were even removed from the carrier airlines in Germany en route to Canada. But since this nice round figure of 1500 claimants has been quoted by the media and has been widely accepted by immigration lawyers, the IRB and other agencies in Canada, there is really no point in disputing it. Furthermore, the figures released by Canadian Immigration are for Czech nationals, not Roma, but it can be assumed that very few non-Romani Czech nationals were seeking refugee status in Canada since the Czech Republic was considered to be a democracy and non-Romani Czechs had little reason to be seeking Convention-refugee status in Canada or anywhere else. Canada receives on an average about 20,000 claims a year from people seeking refugee status. Of these, roughly half are accepted. In 1997, Canada fell short of its projected refugee target by 25 percent, thus. The 1,500 Czech-Romani claimants represented only 6 percent of all Convention refugee claimants who arrived in Canada in 1997, hardly an "invasion.".

(b) The Media Creates A "Gypsy Invasion".

To the Canadian media, however, these 1,500 Romani claimants did represent a "Gypsy invasion." In the period following the airing of the TV Nova documentary on August 6, 1997, and the re-imposition of the visa restriction on October 8, fourteen major Canadian media outlets ran ninety-one stories about the "gypsy" refugees describing their arrival in such journalistic terms as "influx" "flood," "surge," and "tide." They were also accused of creating a "burden" for the taxpayers, a "strain" or "drain" on the economy and of "swamping" the Toronto shelter system and denying space to Canadians in dire need of temporary accommodation. They were also described as having come to Canada to "sponge off the welfare system" and worst of all, they were accused of being a "group of criminals." All of this was unfounded and was, in the this author's opinion, simply an example of the media targeting a group of controversial refugees and was typical of the historical racism in the Canadian media towards a new group of refugees.

Whatever information these reports had to offer about Roma, their origins, culture and history, it had nothing at all to do with the Czech Roma. In an age of the internet, the reporters seem to have taken their source material on Roma from the pages of Victorian novels as they wrote about horses and caravans, horse trading, fortune telling, nomadic tribes, dancing bears, pick pocketing and all the other trappings of the Gypsy stereotype. Interspersed with this stereotypical, romantic mythology were reports from police departments and criminologists in Canada and the US which dealt with accusations of petty urban crime among American and Canadian-born "Gypsies" and "Gypsy-type criminals," none of which had the remotest connection with the Czech-Romani refugees and most of which had nothing to do with any authentic North-American Romani group.

Canadian media cartoonists, who have a long history of lampooning targeted ethnic groups, also got into the act and showed long lines of stereotyped English-Romani caravans blocking the Ontario section of the Trans-Canada highway. Unknown to the media was the fact that most of these ex-Slovakian Roma who had left their rural settlements in Slovakia to find work in the industrialised Czech part of the former Czechoslovakia under communism were from Romani groups who had been sedentary for over 300 years. They had, in fact, become an urbanised, sub-proletariat after they had relocated in the industrialised areas of the Czech-speaking regions either by choice or under the communist Assimilation Plan of 1958 which was designed to break up the Slovak Romani rural communities and relocate the Roma among the urban Czechs as the first phase of a programme aimed at total assimilation. These so-called "Czech Gypsies" were actually Slovakian Roma, most of whom were not even citizens of the Czech Republic when they left for Canada. As usual, the why of the five Ws ( Who, what, when, where and why) of journalism was totally absent from the Canadian media reports.

The media in Canada has a long history of victim-blaming and refugee-bashing and periodically targets various groups but the blame seems to lie more with certain reporters and editors looking for attention-grabbing stories and headlines which they believe will sell papers than with the policy of the media in general. Even during the height of this media Gypsy bashing, a few writers were able to publish some positive material and there were also many letters to the editor which were sympathetic to the Roma. On October 20, 1997, the CBC had broadcast a documentary report produced by Joe Schlessinger entitled Refugees From Democracy, an hour-long, in-depth coverage of the Czech Roma, their persecution and the xenophobic, venomous attitude of most non-Romani Czechs towards them, All the Czech citizens interviewed in this documentary made negative comments about Roma while a few stated they did know: "one Roma who was not like the rest." The Czech Minister of Justice was also interviewed and clearly stated that the crime ratio among Czech Roma was the same as that for the general Czech population. He also pointed out that most Czechs erroneously believe Roma commit more crimes than Czechs because Romani criminals are identified ethnically in the media. It is surprising that even this nationally-aired documentary did not deter the Canadian media from labelling the Czech-Romani refugees as criminals nor get across the fact that Czech-Roma were a sedentary, urbanised sub-proletariat and not a nomadic group.

(c) The backlash

In the opinion of many immigration lawyers and activists in Toronto, Canadian Immigration was influenced by these predominantly negative media reports and badgered by members of Federal Parliament, who in their turn were responding to the demands of their irate electorate for the removal of the "criminal gypsies", took the accusations of criminality seriously and imposed a criminal check on all Czech Roma entering Canada from August 1997. Many were questioned for as long as seven hours after landing in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver by immigration officials. The claims of all the Czech Roma were also delayed for weeks while these criminal checks were being conducted from the Canadian embassy in Prague. This had never been done with any other group of refugees prior to the arrival of the Roma. These criminal checks conducted by Canadian Immigration were declared illegal and a violation of the (Canadian) Charter of Rights. If a specific refugee claimant, from anywhere, is suspected of having links to a terrorist organisation or of having committed a war crime or a serious criminal offence, it is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) who conduct the investigation, not an official of Canadian Immigration based in Prague. All immigrants and sponsored relatives coming into Canada must provide police clearances from their countries of origin as part of the paperwork required by the bureaucrats but in the case of Convention refugees, many are fleeing countries where their persecutors often are the secret police or death squads and this police clearance is difficult or impossible to obtain. The usual policy for Convention refugee applicants, whose criminal background is unknown, is to allow them to enter Canada as Convention-refugee claimants and then do the paperwork and investigations if required while they are being processed within Canada.

Despite the concerns expressed by the media, no significant criminal records were discovered among the Czech Roma refugees. The most common conviction recorded was rvacka in Czech, an offence without an equivalent under Canadian law according to Canadian criminal lawyers who reviewed the Czech criminal code but somewhere between disturbing the peace and simple assault under Canadian law. In almost all cases it involved altercations following ethnic slurs or insults between Roma and non-Roma in bars or other public places where the police usually charged the Roma and released the non-Roma. One Czech Romani woman had her claim delayed from August 1997 until the summer of 1998 because of a criminal record under Communism which listed stealing a bar of chocolate when she was five-years old. Under Canadian law, crimes committed while a minor do not appear on a person’s criminal record. Adult criminal records list only convictions. It was finally revealed that the 40 per cent of the 100 Czech Roma investigated who allegedly had criminal records included: "people that have been arrested by the police without any charges being laid," according to a top official in The Canadian Immigration Department in Ottawa.

One side effect of these criminal checks was that the Toronto Sun, a daily tabloid whose coverage of issues relating to immigration and racial and ethnic communities has come under heavy criticism for its presentation of a single, prejudiced view of the world, was able to publish information gleaned from these police checks. In one case a Romani man, charged with sex crimes but never convicted, was labelled The Gypsy "Beast." How this confidential information from Canadian Immigration managed to get into a daily tabloid was never questioned at the time and has yet to be explained. It was also the Toronto Sun that published the inflammatory interviews with Toronto Metro Councillor, Gordon Chong. In an article published in the Toronto Sun on August 21, 1997, Councillor Chong stated that "gypsies" are a "major immigration problem in Europe" and "have a subculture that exists on crime." He then went on to condemn the "gypsies"( sic) for having no interest in education and said that some of their men "pimped for their wives and daughters." This latter accusation was based on his childhood recollections of Toronto’s Chinatown where he grew up and remembered, as a small boy, seeing store fronts with Romani women sitting inside while their men folk stood outside beckoning in customers to what he then believed to be "Gypsy brothels." These were actually Canadian Vlach-Romani storefront, fortune-telling parlours which were found in most Canadian towns and cities when the Roma began to settle in the urban centres. Prostitution is outlawed among Vlach-Roma and anyone remotely connected with such activities would be declared marimé (defiled) and banished from the community. Other members of Toronto Metro Council, however, were enraged by the comments of Councillor Chong. On September 25, he was summoned before Mayor Barbara Hall and his fellow councillors and asked to either apologise to the Romani community or to resign from office. He chose to apologise to his peers in Council but never did publish an apology in the Toronto Sun which had printed his misinformed statements in the first place.

One of the results of Councillor Chong’s tirade against the Roma and other negative media reports was a skinhead demonstration on August 26, 1997, outside the Lido Motel in Scarborough where about 50 of the Czech-Romani refugees were being housed . A small group of a reported two dozen people carrying signs saying: "Honk If You Hate Gypsies" and: "Canada Is Not A Trash Can." demonstrated in front of the Lido Motel closely watched by parked police cars. The organiser of this group, Walter John Froebrich, told the press the demonstrators were not part of an organised group. He told reporters: "We’re just skinheads from all over the place uniting to fight Gypsies. Forty-seven per cent of the Gypsies coming here are pickpockets or criminals. We don’t want this stuff in Canada." It would seem more than a coincidence that this spurious figure of 47 per cent had appeared in an article in the Toronto Sun Walter Froebrich and six other skinheads including two minors were identified, later arrested and charged under the Hate-Crimes Law for Wilful Promotion of Hatred. Their trials are still ongoing except for Froebrich who pleaded guilty, received a three-month conditional suspended sentence and was ordered to write a letter of apology to the Roma.

The editor of the Toronto ethnic Czech newspaper, Novy Domov, was interviewed on CBC National Television News in August 1997. She denounced the Roma as "bums" and warning her fellow Canadians that they were "only coming to Canada to sit and drink beer in their apartments until they received their next welfare cheque." Her interview was in this author's opinion an example of the same racism that Czech Roma were attempting to escape by leaving the Czech Republic. In September 1997, the Czech and Slovak Association of Canada, an immigrant-aid group which operated on government grants and which had done excellent work to help integrate non-Roma refugees from the former Czechoslovakia during the communist era, sent a formal letter to Lucienne Robillard, then Canadian federal Minister of Citizenship and Immigration protesting the idea that Canada should accept Roma refugees from the Czech republic. The letter stated that racism and persecution of Roma were illegal in the Czech Republic. Like Vaclav Haval and other members of the current Czech government, who have also emphasised this point, that Roma in the Czech republic are protected under the law, the letter failed to publicly acknowledge the substantial evidence that the government is unable to enforce these laws and truly protect the lives of Roma in the Czech Republic. Watchdog organisations like Helsinki Watch, the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) and the US State Department have disclosed that at least thirty-two Roma had been murdered in racist attacks in the Czech Republic since the Velvet Revolution while Paul Polansky, the American professor who revealed the existence of the Czech-run concentration camps for Roma at Lety by Pisek in Bohemia and Hodonin in Moravia, gives the figure of murdered Roma as 50 since the Velvet Revolution He also stated that the number of Roma assaulted by skinheads is over ten times this number and runs at a rate of about 20 attacks a month. Overlooked completely was the fact that the Czech Republic is totally unable to guarantee the life or safety of its Roma citizens nor to impose sentences worthy of the name on the perpetrators of this ethnically-motivated violence. Czech law differentiates between "racially-motivated murders" and "ordinary homicides" where no witnesses could be found to testify that the accused actually used ethnic slurs while committing the crime. These ordinary murders are not listed as racially-motivated murders of Roma. Some Czech-Romani refugees also gave oral accounts of Romani children who were being chased by skinheads and accidentally ran in front of a moving vehicle and were either killed or severely injured. They also maintained that some elderly Roma who were menaced or attacked by skinheads suffered heart attacks and later died in a hospital.

(f) The IRB finally consults the Roma.

In September of 1997, faced with the sudden arrival of the Czech-Romani refugees, the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) became apprehensive that unscrupulous non-Roma might try to enter Canada passing as Romani Convention-refugee claimants. They then decided to work out some verification of Romani ethnicity based on a questionnaire which could be issued to the IRB judges. Apparently their researchers had been reading some books about Roma and collecting material from various sources to compile what are called country-condition reports. These packages are provided to the IRB judges who preside over refugee hearings to assist them in learning about the conditions in the home country of the claimant. In the case of claimants who list persecution as an ethnic minority within a given country, there are often lists of questions or other means by which a judge, unfamiliar with the particular ethnic group in question, can determine if the claimant is really a Kurd, a Tamil or whatever his or her ethnicity might be. It should be mentioned that while Canadian Immigration is responsible for admitting the refugee claimants, processing their forms, incarcerating them for infractions and deporting them if necessary, their hearings are held at an IRB court. The IRB judges are not government employees nor civil servants but are appointed by the Privy Council of the federal government after being nominated by a member of parliament. They are assigned to the Convention Refugee Determination Division (CRDD) and are paid a starting salary of $85,000 per annum which is twice the starting salary of a federal government civil servant. Alternatively, judges can be assigned to the Appeals Division which deals with Convention-refugee appeals. They can serve three terms in office for two, five or seven years and their judgements are supposed to be impartial since they are not employees of the federal government even though their salaries are paid by Ottawa. They hear the claimants cases and each case must be judged impartially on its own merit. There are usually two judges and one refugee claims officer (RCO), who is a civil servant employed by the IRB, and whose role is to have the claimant verify orally the testimony he or she has prepared in the Personal Information Form (PIF) and to point out any discrepancies in the oral version of item 37 of the individual claimant’s PIF during the hearing. To put it in a nutshell, the RCO is there to make sure the refugee claimant is telling the truth while the judges listen to the evidence and then decide whether or not the claim is legitimate. While the judges are supposed to be impartial and independent from Canadian Immigration, critics of the system point out that if a judge admits too many refugees from groups that Canadian Immigration is trying to limit, he or she might not be re appointed for a second term by the Privy Council. Thus, indirect pressure can be exerted by Canadian Immigration on the IRB decisions. The claimant is represented by a lawyer and in most refugee cases, the costs are covered by legal aid. Should the refugee be refused, he or she has the right of one appeal either to Canadian Immigration or to the federal court. However, this is not always covered by legal aid. If the appeal fails, the refugee is deported unless the lawyer can successfully file a Post-Determination Humanitarian and Compassionate Appeal, a forlorn hope which succeeds in perhaps 2% of cases. Canadian Immigration and the IRB also demand that all documents in a foreign language relevant to the claim be translated into English and notarised or certified as a true and proper translation at the claimant’s expense. Convention-refugee claimants who are accepted at an IRB hearing then become accepted Convention refugees. They must then apply for landed immigrant status for which there is a fee of $500 per adult in the family and $100 for each minor child. This can take a year or more and when they are accepted in principle, they must then pay $950 landing fee per adult in the family. Once they are landed, they can then apply for Canadian citizenship.

In September, 1997, the fledgling Roma Community & Advocacy Centre (RCAC) was just coming into being with the help of Patricia Ritter, a Toronto-based immigration lawyer who had worked with many Romani refugee claimants in the past. She and the author of this article were invited to an informal meeting with representatives of the IRB to discuss the situation of the Czech-Romani refugees. The IRB had also been in contact with Dr. Ian Hancock, Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin and then Head of the UN Presidium of the International Romani Union (IRU) and the main representative of the IRU to UNICEF. What the IRB hoped to create with the help of the Roma Community and Advocacy Centre and that of Dr. Hancock was a sort of Romani identification kit for judges who knew nothing of Roma except what appeared in the country conditions package. The IRB researchers had read about American Vlach-Roma who have been the group most written about sub-groups of Roma by anthropologists, "Gypsylorists" and other self-proclaimed "experts’ on Roma as the most-traditional, hence the most publicised and therefore the most accessible group available in published works in English. They were interested in such esoteric aspects of Vlach-Romani culture as the code of ritual cleanliness, their taboos concerning childbirth, the kris-Romani (internal justice mechanism), skirt-tossing and other exotic aspects of this highly-traditional Romani culture. Unfortunately, as we pointed out, the Romungere Roma from the Czech Republic, who were the majority of the Czech-Romani refugees did not follow this culture, nor did the Czech-Sinti refugees while the Czech Vlach-Roma were a minority group. We also pointed out that there were Romani refugees coming , albeit in small numbers, from Rumania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia.. It would thus be impossible, we told them, to make such a do-it-yourself kit since all of these Roma groups followed differing degrees of traditional Romani culture and there was no universal or homogeneous culture. Even knowledge of Romani would not be effective since individual Romani refugees might not speak Romani or might be likely to come from groups of Roma who had lost Romani. Even those who spoke Romani would not all speak the same dialect.

The IRB then decided to host an information seminar on October 17, 1997, at the Vector Video conferencing Centre in Toronto. The invited panel was to consist of Dr. Ian Hancock who would discuss Roma identity in central and eastern Europe; Claude Cahn, Research Co-ordinator, European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), Budapest; Radhoune Nouicer, Liaison Officer, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Prague; and Yvan Jobin, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Ottawa, who would debate the issue of protection relating to Roma from the Czech Republic. This seminar was video-conferenced to IRB offices in Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa, all of which cities had Czech Romani refugees currently in their systems. The seminar was a success in that is did establish that the Roma were a composite Indian group who had left India in the 11^th century, that they were being persecuted in almost all the former communist countries of eastern Europe and that persecution in the Czech Republic was such that many Czech Roma could have a valid reason to seek Convention-refugee status in Canada.

When the visa restriction was re-imposed on October 8, 1997, the Czech-Roma issue was resolved as far as Canadian Immigration was concerned. No more Czech Roma could now come because they could not successfully obtain visas and the applications of those already in Canada could be processed and the majority accepted so that Canada would appear internationally as the "good guy." This decision did not take into account the fact that Czech Romani families were now divided. In many cases, men had come to Canada alone hoping to find work, save money and bring their wives, children or elderly parents later. In other cases, man and wife had arrived in Canada leaving their children with relatives to be brought over once the parents were established. Since nobody knew how long the processing from Convention-refugee claimant to landed immigrant might take, around 600 Czech-Romani claimants returned to the Czech Republic rather than be separated from their families and unable to protect their children, wives or parents from the skinheads and neo-Nazis. The Czech Roma who remained began move slowly through the system by December 1997 when their hearings began to be scheduled. In 1998, the IRB made positive decisions on 738 refugee claims from citizens of the Czech Republic and rejected 78, thus giving an acceptance rate of 89.4 percent These numbers refer to family claims, not the number of people accepted, which would obviously be higher, but cannot be accurately calculated because statistics on the size of refugee families are not available. The total of all Czech nationals accepted as Convention refugees between August 1997 and April 14, 1998 was reported as 96 per cent. Of those cases denied, a few have successfully appealed. One such case involved Josef Mitac, a Czech Romani man, born in the Czech Republic, who spoke only Czech and Romani, At his hearing , his claim was denied because the IRB judges ruled he was too dark to be a member of the group called Roma because his appearance was "more Near Eastern or Asian" and was probably "Pakistani or Turkish." His appeal on September 23, 1999, was upheld by the Federal Court of Appeals and referred to the IRB for a new hearing. At this hearing, he and his family were accepted. As legitimate Czech-Romani Convention refugees.

By the late summer of 1998, many Czech-Roma claimants were being given expedited hearings with only one judge and no RCO which often lasted only half-an-hour compared to the all-day sessions previously held for Roma. Normally, there are two judges and an RCO at regular hearings for all Convention-refugee applicants from all countries. But when a considerable number of refugees from a given country are given hearings, the IRB then establishes a good picture of the country conditions and these do not need to be then re-established at future hearings. The judges also become familiar with the country conditions and a particular group of refugees can then be considered to generally have a valid claim for refugee status , as happened earlier with non-Romani refugees from Bosnia. The IRB then sees no need for lengthy hearings and when a particular refugee presents a convincing PIF, he or she is often given an expedited hearing to help clear the backlog of refugee claimants and allow more time for the more difficult cases which require a lengthy hearing. By accepting between 85 and 95 per cent of all Czech-Romani Convention-refugee claimants, Canada has in effect sent a message to the world that as far as the Czech Romani refugees are concerned Canada considers most of them to have a valid claim for Convention-refugee status based on ethnic persecution in the Czech Republic. This. Of course, will be a black mark on the Czech Republic’s application to join the European Union.

Because of the publicity surrounding the arrival of the Czech-Roma refugees, interviews with members of RCAC and other activist and civil-rights organisations who have been promoting the use of Roma, many Toronto journalists have come to use the term Roma, previously unknown in Canada, and have come to know and understand the truth about the refugees. In the Greater Toronto Area, the term Roma has now replaced "gypsy" in the majority of articles dealing with Romani refugees. In 1998, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) produced a documentary entitled Opre Roma (Stand-up Roma) featuring Julia Lovell and her colleagues in the Western Canadian Romani Alliance, members of RCAC and Romani refugees from the Czech Republic and elsewhere. This use of the term Roma has diverted the media from relying on the stereotypical, published material on "gypsies" as background material for reports on Romani refugees thus forcing journalists to make use of the Internet and has entrenched Roma as an ethnic term on a par with other groups of ethnic refugees such as Kurds, Tamils or Somalis. All of these ethnic groups were unknown to the average Canadian journalist until refugees from these groups began arriving to claim Convention-refugee status. Use of the term Roma has also facilitated the inclusion of the Romani people in equity and access programs as a legitimate ethnic minority. Most people working in these areas tended to see "gypsies" as just any dropout from mainstream society who conformed to the stereotype of what erroneous source material or long-outdated factual accounts they had happened to read about "gypsies." It is the opinion of this author, other Roma working in RCAC and non-Romani activists working in access and equity programs , that Roma will only be taken seriously as a valid ethnic group in Canada when they drop the term "gypsy" and replace it with Roma.

The initial public reaction to the arrival of the Czech Roma was negative because there exists a Gypsy stereotype in the mind of the Canadian public, and the media, in its search for a sensational story, activated this stereotype and played to public fears. We have shown that there is entrenched racism in Canada, in the form of hate groups, widespread stereotyping and ignorance about the Roma, and a history of discrimination based on race in immigration policy. The media reaction to the Czech Roma refugee claimants alarmed the public, who put pressure on government officials, with the result that Czech Roma refugees were made to undergo a criminal check, which was not required for any other group of refugees, and eventually, to stop the flow of refugees, the visa requirement was re-imposed on all Czech visitors to Canada. Though Canadian Immigration did eventually become convinced that country conditions in the Czech Republic warranted consideration of the applicants for refugee status, and most have now been accepted as Convention refugees, that has not, so far, been the result for their Hungarian counterparts, as the next section will discuss.

While the IRB had been busy processing the Czech Roma, more and more Roma from Hungary had been arriving in Canada. In 1994, ten Hungarian nationals applied for refugee status in Canada. In 1995, the figure was thirty-eight. It rose to sixty-four in 1996 and then to 300 in 1997. In 1998, it soared to 972 and the figures for 1999, not yet released, are likely to be much higher. There are an estimated 3,000 Hungarian Roma currently in the refugee system, most of them in the Greater Toronto Area and more are arriving almost daily despite efforts to prevent them from boarding flights to Canada as tourists or to browbeat them into returning once they arrive at a Canadian airport. The Canadian Government has decided this flow must be stopped but seems reluctant to simply re-impose the visa requirement for Hungary as was done to stop the influx of Czech Roma. On the other hand, it doesn’t want to accept large numbers of Hungarian Roma as Convention refugees since there is no way of predicting how many might come and for how long. Hungary is already a member of NATO and has applied for membership in the EU. By accepting large numbers of Hungarian-Romani refugees, Canada would in effect, send a message to the world that Roma were being persecuted in Hungary which might have a negative effect on that country’s chances of being accepted in the EU.

Most of the Hungarian Romani claimants had their decisions deferred or were simply not called for hearings while Canadian Immigration ruminated over the dilemma of the growing number of Hungarian Romani refugees. In the meantime, the claimants have been housed in motels in Hamilton, Saint Catharines, Fort Erie and elsewhere in south-western Ontario between Toronto and the American border, far from the services and government offices they need which are located in Toronto. The reason given for this by the Metro Shelters officials is that the shelters in the Greater Toronto Area are full to capacity. Without a car, the only way to commute between these remote towns and Toronto is by public transportation which is sporadic, unreliable, complicated and time-consuming. Refugees unable to speak English often get lost in this system. There is a desperate shortage of Hungarian interpreters and of social services in these areas and the refugees soon become demoralised with the endless waiting and constant rumours of possible mass deportation to Hungary. However, they are housed in motels, free to come and go during the daytime and are not placed in detention as they are in some countries.

By the autumn of 1998, Canadian Immigration had arrived at a solution. It was decided to hold two trial cases and to invite a panel of Hungarian "experts" on Roma to testify at these hearings about country conditions in Hungary. Canadian Immigration picked two of the weakest claims possible and scheduled these for hearings at the IRB. The Hungarian "experts" on Roma, who were flown to Canada , accommodated in a luxury hotel and wined and dined at Canadian taxpayers’ expense, were Jeno Kaltenbach, Parliamentary Commissioner (Ombudsman) for National and Ethnic Minority Rights in Hungary; Lipot Holtzl, Deputy Secretary of State at the Hungarian Ministry of Justice; Florian Farkas, President of the Hungarian Romani organisation Lungo Drom and President of the National Gypsy Minority Self Government and Andras Biro, journalist, then Chair of the Board of the ERRC, Chair of NEKI (Legal Defence Bureau for National and Ethnic Minorities), Chair of the Board of the "Otherness Foundation" (Másság Alapítvány) and former director of various other non-governmental organisations. Also invited to participate as witnesses for Counsel were Orest Subtelny, professor of history and political science at York University, Toronto, a specialist in national-minority relations in central and eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union; and Dr. Ian Hancock, professor in the Department of Linguistics and English at the University of Texas at Austin.

Since Kaltenbach and Holtzl are non-Romani members of the Hungarian government they could hardly do less than deliver the government’s party line while Farkas, an assimilated Rom, is dependant on the Hungarian government for his position and his salary. While in Toronto, he claimed to be too busy to meet with members of RCAC or representatives of the Hungarian Roma. Biro is not a Rom and his knowledge of the persecution of Roma is that of an outside observer. His testimony, though a little more positive than that of the other three witnesses, was not sufficient to sway the IRB judges in the two test cases. This delegation from the Hungarian government admitted that while there is widespread discrimination and instances of persecution in Hungary, laws are in place to protect minorities. The consensus of the IRB judges, Vlad Bubrin and Barbara Berger, after hearing their testimony, was that while that "the claimants faced discrimination but not severe enough to be considered persecution and require refugee protection." However, one might ask if references to Hungarian statistics showing that every year less Roma are being murdered, beaten, burned out of their homes, refused jobs or service in restaurants mean that Roma are protected? . In effect, the laws designed to protect minorities in Hungary are there to protect the Romanian, Schwabian (German) and Slovak minorities who have powerful infrastructures. Roma are theoretically included but lacking such an infrastructure, a business community or an educated elite, they have no means to enforce these laws for their own protection. The testimony of Professors Subtelny and Hancock was rejected on the grounds that their knowledge of the situation was not first hand since they did not reside in Hungary. In reality, Hancock’s knowledge of conditions in which Roma live in Hungary and elsewhere is far beyond that of Biro, Kaltenbach and Holtzl. With such a stacked deck, the Hungarian-Romani claimants in both cases were denied Convention-refugee status and these decisions were promptly appealed. Since then, this testimony and the findings have been published and distributed to IRB judges as: "Issue Paper, Roma In Hungary: Views of Several Specialists." This "template decision" is now being used by many IRB judges to refuse further Hungarian-Romani refugee claimants and has resulted in a rate of acceptance for Hungarian Romani refugees of less than 12% of cases heard as compared to the 89 per cent acceptance rate for Czech Roma. This is the first time that the refugee division of the IRB has used such lead cases as precedents for future trials and according to the Toronto immigration lawyer who is currently appealing the test cases at the Federal Court of Appeals the entire process is illegal. To begin with, the claimants did not have the finances to bring their own witnesses from Hungary and Canadian Immigration refused to pay for their flights. According to Jack Martin, executive director of the Refugee Lawyers Association of Ontario, the test cases are illegal because refugee claimants who will be affected by this decision should have been given the chance to cross-examine the witnesses from Hungary. This author and lawyers who have been working with the Czech-Romani refugees have found that the reasons given by Hungarian-Romani Convention-refugee claimants in their PIFs as to why they feel they were forced to leave Hungary are no different from those of the Czech Roma and echo the smaller number of Roma refugees from Rumania, Bulgaria, Poland, Bosnia, Kosovo and other regions of the former Yugoslavia. Official Hungarian reports reveal that Hungarian restaurant owners are being taken to court by Roma for refusing to serve them while Hungarian-Romani refugees in Canada have police reports in Hungarian revealing that their homes were burned down by unknown arsonists A widow declares that her Romani husband was murdered in a billiard hall by a Hungarian and nobody was arrested for the crime, which is confirmed by her adult daughter. A Romani student has a hospital report stating he was blinded in one eye after a skinhead attack. We must either believe that these Hungarian Romani refugees are lying and the supporting documents are forgeries, or that unlike the Czech Republic where the foreign and even the Czech press reported racist murders and other violence against Czech Roma, there is censorship in the Hungarian media and the reports are not being published in the foreign press. It would appear that what we are being spoon fed from Hungary are reports about Hungarian citizens being charged for minor offences like refusing to serve a Romani family in a restaurant.. In the opinion of activists in Toronto, the latter is the case. Almost every young Vlach-Romani female refugee from Hungary arrived with short hair. When asked why young Hungarian Romani women cut their hair, they replied that it is a survival mechanism against neo-Nazis and skinheads since they assume Romani girls traditionally wear their hair long. They young women also said they wore jeans instead of traditional Romani skirts in Hungary to help them pass for Hungarians.

In the fall of 1999, Hungarian Romani leader József Krasznai, Vice-President for the Province of Fejér in the Hungarian Roma Parliament, a national non-governmental organisation (NGO), whose members are elected only by Roma and which has only consultative status with the Hungarian government, made two visits to Toronto. On his second, he testified on behalf of a Toronto immigration lawyer at an IRB hearing for a Hungarian Romani claimant. He challenged the Issue Paper and gave a much more accurate picture of the persecution and systemic discrimination of Roma in Hungary. This was taped and has since been circulated among immigration lawyers representing Hungarian-Romani clients. In January, 2000, at the request of a Toronto immigration lawyer, the Canadian Federal Court of Appeals has agreed to review the Issue Paper and the test cases in March, 2000. Hopefully, the Issue Paper based on the testimony of the Hungarian government’s "experts" will be disallowed and so that in future hearings involving Hungarian Romani-refugees, each case will be judged on its own merit and not on the precedents of the two negative test cases. It is to be hoped that the persecution of the Roma in the former communist countries will eventually be resolved not by forcing them to become refugees but by condemnation and sanctions imposed by the United Nations against those countries which are currently persecuting their Romani minorities with impunity.

The history of Romani migration to Canada has shown that the only times that Roma have faced opposition when they tried to immigrate to Canada have been when they have been publicly identified as Roma. From this we can conclude that there is entrenched racism against Roma in Canada. The reactions of the media to the Czech Roma influx illustrated the nature of the Romani stereotype in Canada. It is remarkable that these stereotyped images seem to have been accepted without question and allowed to influence immigration policy. It is also apparent that it is difficult for Canada to accept refugees from countries that it believes are democracies and with which it would like to maintain good relations. That most of the Czech Romani refugees have now been accepted illustrates that it is possible, despite obstacles, for recent Roma refugees to integrate into Canadian society like their predecessors in previous eras. However, the situation of the Hungarian Roma refugees in Canada is yet to be resolved. It is to be hoped that Canadian immigration will thoroughly review and consider the true conditions for Roma in Hungary before making their decision about the future of these refugee claimants.