Several dozen activists and public figures from Ukraine, Germany, Romania and Moldova gathered at the annual conference “Remembering the Rom:nja Genocide – Fighting Against Racism”. Participants met in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova.
Two days, from 22 to 23 October, the representatives of the invited countries, who are actively working in the direction of memory preservation, devoted to the discussion of current issues and modern problems in the field of social movement, fight against discrimination of Roma and preservation of the memory of the genocide of the Roma people. The conference became a platform for exchange of experience and communication. Roma activist Izaura Drima from ARCA joined the event on volunteer terms.
The organizers of the event talked about the long-term activities aimed at studying and understanding the genocide of Roma in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. As part of cooperation with organizations from different countries, mobile exhibitions and videos were created with more than 200 stories of persecuted Roma and other participants in those events in Romania, Moldova and Ukraine. At the conference, the participants who took part in materials gathering spoke about their unique experience of working with exhibitions.
“During the event we reflected on the situation with discrimination against Roma in each country, shared the experience of our activities. We discussed in detail the methods and conditions for preserving the memory of the greatest tragedy of the Roma people. One of the most interesting and useful for me was the speech of Mykhailo Tiahlyi (researcher of the Ukrainian Centre for Holocaust Studies, – ed.;). He spoke quite a lot about the persecution of the Roma, about the memorials and the current situation”.
During the two-day discussion, activists and public figures paid attention to the state of social, economic, and political discrimination in the participating countries, as well as countermeasure strategies. A significant part of the discussion was the topic of the struggle for compensation for the surviving Roma, their families and the damage caused by the persecution for the next generations.
Reference: In Ukraine, a mobile exhibition was opened under the name “Despised Genocide” in 2019. On the part of Ukraine, materials for the exhibition were collected by the Ukrainian Centre for Genocide Studies. It was the third, final stage of the project. During that time, specialists visited many Ukrainian regions in order to collect as many testimonies as possible about the realities of Roma under
