By Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Roma Amor campaign will encourage respectful behaviour though crime fears linger
Reports of abuse and discrimination against Roma Gypsies who attend Roskilde Festival to collect bottles for their deposits has led festival organisers to begin a campaign to help foster better relations.
The campaign, Roma Amor, started in June 2011 and has stimulated lively debate on Facebook where many people have voiced their worries about the link between the Roma and crime at the annual music festival.
“I have had some bad experience with Roma,” worte Andreas Thanh Long Jensen. “I busted one of them going through my tent and my bag. He said that he was just checking for cans, but why would I hide them in my sleeping bag.”
Frederik Petersson commented that the bottle deposits ought to go to charity. “I find it kind of selfish to collect bottles for personal gain, when other people do the exact same thing to help people who are actually in need.”
Aware of these sorts of concerns, the festival has launched a refund mediation team as part of the ‘good refund initiative’. The team will maintain a dialogue with the Roma collectors and encourage them and festival-goers to be respectful of each other.
The campaign also hopes to highlight conditions for a group of people that faces high rates of poverty. Many of those in Denmark have travelled here to pick up bottles in order to scrape together a living.
Roma Amor is part of a larger effort by Roskilde Festival organisers this year to bring about awareness of poverty and the plight of people such as the Roma.
Campaign Manager, Anna Sophie Rønde, drew attention to the discrimination by festival guests, who have been known to hang signs outside their camps warning off Roma, often in profane or offensive language.
“When Roma people go to Roskilde Festival to collect deposits, it’s not necessarily because they are Roma, but because they are poor,” she said.
Rønde also pointed out that in Romania, where Roma make up 2.5 percent of the population, only 27 percent of Roma are employed. Those that are employed earn around €10 a day.
A team of social workers has also been established to ensure that children are not made to work through the night and in front of main stages, where their size allows them to slip through the crowds to pick up discarded cans and bottles.
The point made by Frederik Petersson is rather silly if not naïve; the deposit on the bottles and cans is there for the person who bought the bottles or the cans and if they are too lazy to take the bottles back why should not those that wish to do so collect them for income.
It was like that for us when we were children when we still had a deposit scheme on bottles, both soft drink and beer, and many a child's pocket money was made up from just the collecting of such discards.
That it is, nowadays, at those festivals and other such locations in Europe Romani adults and children who collect the bottles and cans for deposit is a sign that other people do not value such amounts of small change as are those depots. But, does the saying to state that many pennies make a pound?
The fact is that were it not for the Romani People at such events many of those bottles and cans would be left laying about and not be returned to where they belong. The problem is that the purchasers do not, as said, the small amount which constitutes the deposit enough to bring back those bottles or cans to claim it.
That is, really, what is wrong with society in our so-called developed countries, whether Western Europe or the USA, etc. People still, despite the Great Recession more or less still in full swing, do not value their pennies enough to make those deposit schemes work properly.
Let the Romani go about their business and as to children being overworked. Good G-d, the kids see that, in general, as fun, and that includes and especially scavenging in front of the main stages. There is also money to be found lost on the ground which they will be more than happy to add to their collections.
I doubt, also, that the festival goers would love adults gathering the collectables in front of the main stages and thus blocking their view of the happenings on the stages.
In addition to that it is natural for Romani (Gypsy) children to “work” and has always been, in the same way as children have always worked on farms from a young age. Now they are bored all the time and get up to mischief. Let them do valuable work and they will feel much better too.
© 2011
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