Margizens. Exclusion and state violence towards the Romanian Roma community in Poland: Margizeni. Wykluczenie i przemoc ze strony państwa wobec społeczności rumuńskich Romów w Polsce

Abstract

A Romanian Roma community has been present in the largest Polish cities since the beginning of the 1990s. Although their presence was initially perceived as temporary, some members of this group have now been living in Poland for more than 20 years. However, for much of that time they have been invisible to the authorities, with only occasional exposure, and the main reasons for intervention were an attempt to remove them from the country, or from territory they were living on.In this paper, I would like to describe the situation of Romanian Roma in one Polish city, Wroclaw. On their example I present different levels of exclusion from the community and space, describe the process of marginalisation (as a part of anti-Roma practices), as well as the tendency to use criminal law to discipline behaviours which society considers to be inappropriate and which it does not want to see. I’m thus presenting problems of evictions from public and private spaces, cases of prejudice followed by xenophobic attacks performed by representatives of Polish society and general lack of support neither from the general public, social institutions or police. Those practices lead to dep ravation of sense of security of the Roma population in Wroclaw as police officers are perceived by them (and behaves) rather as oppressors who chase beggars away, fine them and confiscate money they earned on the street. And they fail in protection Roma community against xenophobic violence form the host society – or to be more precise they decided to abdicate from this role.The control of and state’s violence against the Roma community is made possible by labelling them as non-members of society, as strangers – persons to whom we can apply different rules than to ourselves.