RIGHT TO STAY MOVEMENT
From the mid-1950s, Romani people migrated together with other workers under the recruitment agreements concluded by Germany with various countries until 1968. They were used for difficult work in German factories and companies for which no other workers were available. As the term ” guest workers ” reveals, these people should only be temporarily available as workers in Germany’s economy and should be replaced again after a limited period of working time. However, people not only worked, they also lived in Germany, developed friendships, fell in love, founded their own families or brought their children and partners to them. They helped to build up Germany, paid taxes and became involved in sports and sociopolitical clubs. The Romani people with their double identities mostly perished as members of the states from which they came as workers, i.e. as Italians, Spaniards, Turks, ex-Yugoslavs. However, they still regularly experienced racist discrimination and exclusion as so-called foreigners.
In Germany, besides the German Sinti and Romani people, some of whom have still not been given back the citizenship they were deprived of during the Nazi period, there were also migrated stateless Romani people. They came to Germany in the 1980s and requested the right to stay as well as civil rights for themselves and their families.
In addition to the recruited workers and the stateless Romani people, from the 1980s onwards there was also an increasing number of Romani people who fled to Germany from expulsion, pogroms and war. In particular, Romani people requested asylum, which had fled Romania from 1989 after the overthrow of the Ceausescu regime and shortly before and during the long civil wars in the former Yugoslavia from 1991 to 2001.
After 1945, the right of asylum was anchored in Germany’s Basic Law due to the experience of Nazi expulsion and persecution of people. This should enable people who are exposed to political persecution and displacement to be admitted to Germany in the future. Stateless and fled Romani people, survivors and descendants of victims of the Nazi regime, tried to claim this right. But in the rarest cases, the federal government, the states, the municipalities were ready to take Romani people. Instead, Germany agreed on readmission agreements with the countries from which the refugees came and deported the people there.
Since the 1980s, Romani people organized and committed itself to recognizing their right to stay as victims and descendants of the Nazi persecution and as seekers for protection due to current racism and expulsion from their countries of origin. These protests included assemblies, demonstrations, occupations of institutions, blockades of roads and border crossings, hunger strikes and occupations of former concentration camps. In the early 1990s, the Rome and Cinti Union Hamburg and its chairman Rudko Kawczynski stood out in this movement. Between 1989-1993, he was instrumental by organising nationwide protests for the right to stay of Romani people asylum seekers living in Germany.
The best-known protest actions of this period are the two rallies organised in 1989 on the grounds of the former Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg and the hunger strike by 20 Romani people demanding the right to stay for the 700 stateless Romani people living in Hamburg.
In January 1990, after the deportation stop from Romani people to Yugoslavia and Romania was lifted, about 400 Romani people occupied the Cologne Cathedral. Previously, in 1989, almost 1 000 people marched through North Rhine-Westphalia to the state capital of Düsseldorf in a demonstration train they called the “Bettelmarsch” . Nevertheless, NRW negotiated the repatriation of these people with the Yugoslav government. As a result, the people demonstrated from April 1990 in a new “begging march” from Bremen to Bonn and on to the Dutch border where the demonstrators were not allowed to go on. In addition, further rallies, church asylum and so-called protest camps for the right of residence of Romani people took place again and again. In November 1990, a protest camp was held at the Swiss border where about 800 stateless Roma partially blocked the border and sent a delegation to Geneva.
In May 1993, about 80 people occupied under the saying: “Gassed back then-deported today”, a church on the site of the former Dachau concentration camp. Their demand to the government of the Federal Republic of Germany was the recognition of Romani people as an ethnic and cultural minority and a secure right of residence for Romani people from the former Yugoslavia. This occupation was ended by a massive police squad.
Afterwards, the protesters decided to continue their struggle for the right to stay on two different levels: while one group went to Strasbourg to petition the European Parliament on behalf of all the Romani people who had been in Dachau, the other group started a protest march throughout southern Germany.
This petition was declared admissible by the Committee on Petitions a month later. The European Parliament’s Committee on Fundamental Freedoms and Democracy prepared a document on the situation of the Sinti and Roma in which they took up essential demands of the protesters, such as the granting of the right of residence for the persecuted Romani people. The Committee on Petitions of the European Parliament condemned the readmission agreements between the states of the EU and the states of Central and Eastern Europe. Romani people, who had fled from Romania and Ex-Yugoslavia, were supposed to be given a residence permit and the admission of their family members was also to be facilitated. The German government was also called upon to compensate Romani people and her family members for the victims of Nazi persecution. The Committee recommended that the governments of the member states add an additional protocol on minorities to the European Convention on Human Rights, in which the definition of minority explicitly includes the Sinti and Romani people under the reference to “non-territorial minorities”.
Another spectacular event was the Europe-wide day of action in November 1994, when 100 Romani people with children and supporters occupied the Permanent Representation of the European Commission in Bonn. They demanded a stop to deportations to former Yugoslavia and Romania and a right to stay in the FRG, as well as the recognition of the Romani people as a European people and the guarantee of minority rights for Romani people by the federal government.
The right to stay movement in the early 1990s was mainly organized by the Rome and Cinti Union (RCU), which was a registered association in Hamburg since 1983. The RCU has focused primarily on the concerns and demands of the migrated Romani people. In addition, especially the committed people from the then Rom e.V. in Cologne were active against racism and in a feminist way with spectacular actions and support for the Romani people seeking the right to stay.
The Central Council of German Sinti and Roma primarily represented the interests of the German minority, so that the migrated Romani people needed their own representatives, especially with regard to questions of the right to stay, and also founded their own movements.
The great protests of the 1990s slowly shook, because due to the readmission agreements of Germany with other countries many Romani people had been deported, the border regime was further exacerbated, with the new asylum law of 1993 a legal entry into Germany became almost impossible and also, Because the refugees from former Yugoslavia were able to stay in Germany for years with chain tolerations, since deportation to war was in fact not possible. However, the so-called ” Chain Tolerations” (Kettenduldungen) did not provide people with a secure residence title and the possibility of deportation constantly hovered over the lives and life plans of entire families and also of young people who had been born and raised in Germany.
Since 2009, the Roma Center Göttingen has been campaigning for Romani people’s right to stay with the campaign “alle bleiben” (“all stay”). In the 2000s, they organized numerous demonstrations and nationwide protests about the right to stay. In 2012, they co-founded the “Bundes Roma Verband” as a mother organization for associations of Eastern European Roma in Germany. They also supported the protest of refugees from Romani people of the initiative Romano Jekhipe in 2016 at the memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe murdered in National Socialism.