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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgWMj5ULlmw
I'm
a Roma Woman – Campaign – Video
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http://www.osce.org/odihr/150141
– OSCE on International Roma Day – April 8
“Education is key to opening up
greater opportunity for equal participation of Roma and Sinti youth in social,
political, economic and cultural life. Empowering Roma and Sinti youth and
preventing their marginalization can play a huge part in making greater
opportunities and participation a reality not only for them, but also for the
communities they will someday lead,” Dačić said, while calling on participating
States to take active measures to support this……
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Roma
Leadership for the 21st Century
April 8, 2015 by Mensur Haliti – Roma Initiative Office
Our sole preoccupation with the brilliance of personalities
and isolated individuals must be overridden by the creation of collective
brilliance.
International Roma Day is an opportunity to realize that the major source
of hope for Roma in Europe is the Roma people themselves. Waiting for the EU
and governments to solve the problems of our people is not an option. This sort
of dependency contributes to a deep-seated sense of inferiority. Consequently,
both Roma and non-Roma alike are convinced that we have always been mentally,
physically, spiritually, and culturally inferior.
Rebuilding dignity and pride, and developing confidence, competence, and
self-reliance are the prime goals for our leadership in the 21st century. We
have to look at ourselves, draw on strength from our predecessors, and grow
through collective successes.
From the time we arrived in Europe at least a thousand years ago, our
bodies and minds have been under assault. We have suffered and survived
Europe’s terror, humiliation, and denial, including slavery, racial otherness,
discrimination, forced assimilation, persecution, deportation, and genocide.
Despite this, we have learned, created, invented, discovered, built, and
thought. We have mastered a “way out of no way” and contributed to the overall
development and rebirth of the arts in Europe.
The 19th and 20th centuries saw some of our ancestors’ most important steps
forward in resistance, self-definition, collective form of protest, and more
organized political action. Despite all the hardships and external negative
forces, our critical voices present the most progressive minority leadership in
21st-century Europe.
In the struggle to prove our emancipation, many of our people have paid a
high price. Thanks to those who sacrificed, we live in a time when visibility
of the Roma situation is greater than ever. We made the EU, national
institutions, and various international and intergovernmental organizations,
agencies, and bilateral and private donors more committed to supporting change
in the lives of our people.
We have also been developing a new stratum of citizens who can help surface
a more impactful leadership. We are getting bigger in number and stronger in
knowledge. The number of university students and graduates, journalists,
writers, artists, public intellectuals, lawyers, politicians, civil servants,
doctors, and teachers has been steadily growing over the last two decades.
Besides this growing “elite,” our communities are also recognized as
potential game changers. In many localities, regions, and countries, we
represent a great voting power. We are also the youngest and fastest-growing
demographic segment in the EU. This adds up to invaluable potential and
strength that, if well organized, could transform the leadership status and the
well-being of our people.
Yet anyone who looks beyond the glow of the moment will understand that
neither our leadership nor the situation of our people will change overnight.
The context has changed dramatically over the past 10 years. This has been a
decade of paradox with enormous challenges. Attempts at bettering the lives of
our people have been, to say the least, largely rhetorical and without
substantial results. Yet it has also been a decade powered by new hope, as we
have grown in number, knowledge, and individual achievement. Today, we are at a
moment where the opportunity to move ahead has never been greater.
The key question is: how we can seize this moment and take charge of our
destiny?
We have to take the risk of leadership, which means to enable others with
shared values and motives, and purposefully deploy our various resources of
knowledge, skills, social capital, and material means to reposition the demands
of our people in the political process that shapes their future. Moving in this
direction is a very difficult and complex task—impossible to accomplish
individually in solitude. It requires a collective power and transformation in
ethics, competence, roles, and relationships.
We need to build confidence and confront the notion that we are hopeless,
powerless, and voiceless, that we need help and assistance, as well as other
“gifts” from the outside. We need to create a context in which our future
leadership is part and takes part of common history and struggle, as a moral
source for mobilization, critical reflection, adaptation, and aspirations for
collective improvement.
To engage in the distribution of wealth and power in society, we need to
replace our disbelief in politics by political engagement in the democratic
practices of decision making.
If we realize that none of us can succeed alone in today’s changing world,
we can achieve much more than what we have until today. Our sole preoccupation
with the brilliance of personalities and isolated individuals must be
overridden by the creation of collective brilliance.
Filling the need for belonging is not just a personal struggle for
connection but also our collective challenge, because it directly affects the
patterns of disorganization that weaken our leadership strength and impact. Our
future leadership should take the path in which people can discern common
interests and mobilize common resources on behalf of those interests, including
those of our supporters.
“In democratic countries,” Alexis de Tocqueville once wisely observed,
“knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge that
depend on others.” Moving forward, we have to better understand and combine our
resources. To achieve this, we need to develop mutual relationships and
experiences that would support future leadership in attaining a sense of
urgency, shared purpose, courage, hope, and consistent support.
We have to come to a place where every individual success will be
considered as part of a collective success, and where most of the individual
successes would depend on the others. Only then will we be able to exercise
more effective and impactful grassroots leadership, organizational leadership,
political leadership, and intellectual leadership in making democracy work
every day for our people.