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March 31
A CAMPAIGN TO have ethnic minority group status granted to the Traveller community in Ireland is gathering momentum, writes FIONA GARTLAND
Launched by the Irish Traveller Movement (ITM) late last year, the campaign is supported by the Equality Authority, Amnesty International and the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism.
Up to now no group in Ireland has been afforded ethnic minority status, something which the ITM argues would provide greater protection and recognition for Travellers’ culture. They say it would also have implications in terms of ensuring Traveller representation in the political system.
A petition is currently being collected, to be sent to the Department of Justice, calling on the Government to grant the community ethnic status. This involves just a simple declaration by the government.
Ethnic status has already been granted to Irish Travellers in England after the courts ruled that they fell within the definition of an ethnic group.
The Government is resisting the pressure, however. In answer to a recent parliamentary question, Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern said the Government accepts the right of Travellers to their cultural identity and is committed to applying all the protections afforded to national minorities under relevant international conventions. But he added: “The Government does not hold that Travellers are ethnically different from the majority of Irish people.”
And, in a recent report to the National Traveller Monitoring and Advisory Committee, the Department of Justice says the recognition of Travellers as an ethnic minority was “of no domestic legal significance”. The report says as it stands travellers in Ireland have the same civil and political rights as other citizens. There is no restriction on them enjoying their own culture, religion or language.
But according to the ITM, giving Travellers ethnic status would send a strong message that their cultural heritage and place in Irish society has recognition and worth. It would provide greater protection of Travellers’ cultural independence under European and International conventions already ratified by the Irish Government, such as the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities.
IF ETHNIC STATUS was given there would have to be official recognition of Traveller culture in the provision of education, health services and housing, and nomadism would have to be properly catered for in housing provision.
The ITM says it would also have implications in terms of ensuring Traveller representation within the Irish political system. If status was granted they would test this under the convention.
But among Travellers, the matter is not settled either, with some seeing the search for ethnic status as a step away from the settled community that might lead to further discrimination instead of equality.
There are an estimated 25,000 Travellers in Ireland, making up more than 4,485 Traveller families. They are an indigenous minority who have been part of Irish society for centuries. They share distinct cultural values and language known as Gammon or Cant, as well as customs and traditions such as nomadism, which distinguish them from the settled community.
Damien Peelo, director of ITM, believes Traveller’s fulfil the criteria of what we now call an ethnic minority group, by European standards and everything else.
“They have the shared common history, they have the shared language, they have shared customs and traditions . . . the Equality Authority found that too.”
Policy has changed but discrimination still exists, he says.“An awful lot of good policies were created at State level in relation to health, accommodation, education, service provision, employment and recognition of Travellers’ cultural differences,” he says. “But where it falls short is in implementation.”
He says one of the barriers to delivery is that people who are charged with the implementation of those policies don’t believe in what they are being asked to do. Local authorities charged with providing Traveller-specific accommodation sometimes don’t believe it is the right way to go.
“They think living in a caravan is somehow alien and shouldn’t be supported, they think that Travellers should be assimilated into wider society,” he says.
“They have quite a lot of power in that regard and they have no accountability if they don’t do what they are being asked to do.”
If ethnic minority status is granted it can help address these issues, he says.
The ITM will be organising debates on ethnicity around the country in the coming weeks.
Traveller Irish or Irish Traveller? The arguments for . . . and against
Hughie Friel
Hughie Friel is an anti-racism and accommodation worker with the Donegal Travellers Project. He says Travellers identify themselves as an ethnic minority, but society and the Government do not. He believes recognition could bring a change within society and within the Traveller community.
Although officially assimilation of Travellers into the settled community is not Government policy, in practice it is, he says.
“In Donegal, if they offer you a house and you look for Traveller specific accommodation they deem you to be awkward. You wait a long time, then you have children so you take the house they are offering. But you are not allowed have your dogs, your horses or your traditions; that’s how the culture disappears. If it keeps proceeding in this way there will be no Travellers left in 20 years.”
He says you have to be 18 months parked on the road in a caravan to get on the housing list, but if you are in private rented accommodation they put you on the list straight away. “If we had ethnic status maybe we could challenge that,” he says.
Friel has four children and would like to see Traveller culture taught in schools, just as Chinese or Indian culture is taught when a Chinese or Indian pupil joins. “We’re still not recognised in the school curriculum. Having ethnic status might help to encourage that,” he says.
Rose Marie Maughan
Rose Marie Maughan from Mayo works in the Irish Traveller Movement as a membership development officer for the northwest. She feels strongly that ethnic minority status would be good for her community.
“It would be telling me the people of Ireland put a value on my culture and my way of life,” she says. She has a better chance of reaching her true potential, she says, if her culture is respected, valued and recognised in an equal manner to the identity of the majority culture in Ireland.
In the past, Ms Maughan has hidden her identity in order to obtain employment. If ethnic group status was recognised, she says, there would no longer be a need to hide. She works with the Traveller movement because it is the only place at present that will allow her to reach her potential.
“My true identity is valued and recognised here,” she says. “I believe if our ethnic status was recognised by the State and society it would place a value on our culture.”
She says the EU Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities would also afford additional rights to Travellers and would put more of an onus on the Irish State to address the community’s needs.“Sometime down the line, sometime in the future we could replicate what happened in America with Obama,” she says.
Cllr Martin Ward
Cllr Martin Ward, a member of Tuam Town Council and the Traveller Education Development Group, is firmly against ethnic status for the Traveller community.
“My loyalty is to Ireland first and the Traveller community second, we’re Irish Travellers not Traveller Irish,” he says. “I believe we are part of a social group within Irish society. There are an awful lot of similarities between the Traveller community and the settled community.” He believes there are more important issues to focus on within the community, such as education, employment and accommodation. Ethnic status would just give Travellers another label, he says. “What does ethnicity mean? It means you are totally different. In looking for ethnic status we are just pushing ourselves away from the settled community,” he says. He queries the motivation behind the campaign.
“Travellers on the ground are not worried about ethnic status. Let us not have settled people pushing an agenda on the Traveller community.” Discrimination will not be cured by introducing a new label, he says.
“Ethnic status is not a magic wand. I don’t see how it would change people’s attitudes. We can enact all the laws we want, but until people change their attitude to the Traveller community nothing is going to happen.”
Winnie McDonagh
Winnie McDonagh works in Traveller education with a children’s charity in Dublin.
She is cautious about the ethnic status issue and describes herself as “sitting on the fence”. There has been a severe shortage of consultation, she says.
“I can see the advantages and the disadvantages, but I want to hear the representative groups putting forward their arguments. I would like to see wider consultation with Travellers before ethnic status is sought.” The debate brings back her memories of a plan some years ago to develop a flag for Travellers. At the time, the issue was controversial and was being pushed by a small number of people. It caused a lot of uncertainty; people were not aware what it was leading to and they feared it meant they would lose their citizenship, she says. They weren’t told what implications it would have.
“Most Travellers see themselves as citizens of Ireland, though separate from the settled community and with their particular lifestyle, customs and traditions,” she says.
She says the term “ethnic status” has negative connotations for some people and could be associated with ethnic cleansing in such places as Bosnia.“If people think it will make them be treated more negatively and more separately, they might think it would be better to stay where they are,” she says.
Iraqi politicians from rival Arab, Kurd and Turkman ethnic groups will delay until June recommendations on the disputed city of Kirkuk, as they have failed to resolve a feud over the issue, they said on Sunday.
Minority Kurds see oil-rich Kirkuk as their ancient capital and want it to be part of their semi-autonomous region in Iraq's north, an idea rejected by the city's Turkmen and Arabs.
U.S. officials say the dispute between Arabs and Kurds over territory and oil has overtaken sectarian tensions as the leading threat to Iraq's long term stability.
So sensitive is the issue that officials were forced to exempt Kirkuk from Iraq's provincial elections on Jan. 31 because rival lawmakers could not agree on how to treat it.
A committee of seven legislators representing Iraq's different ethnic groups -- two Arabs, two Kurds, two Turkmen and an Assyrian Christian -- and another made up of Kirkuk councillors were due to draft recommendations on how to resolve the dispute at the end of this month.
"Both committees have agreed to extend the period of work by two months to secure enough time to reach a compromise," Hassan Toran, a Turkman councillor involved in the draft, told Reuters.
"It's too difficult to reach common ground now. More time is definitely needed to solve such contentious issues."
The struggle over Kirkuk highlights a wider divide across Iraq between Arabs and Kurds nearly six years after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 that ousted Saddam Hussein. Kurds are alarmed at Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's call for a strong, central government, which they fear threatens their hard-won autonomy.
The Kurds want to reverse Saddam's policy of "Arabisation" in Kirkuk, which involved expelling thousands of Kurds, but the city's Arabs now complain the pendulum has swung the other way, with the Kurdish government deliberately stacking the city with Kurds and intimidating its Arab minority.
"The Kurds have hampered efforts to reach an urgent solution to the problem of Kirkuk," said Mohammed Jubouri, an Arab councillor. "It's very clear that their final target is to impose full control over Kirkuk. We will never accept that."
But Awat Mohammed, a Kurdish council member, was hopeful.
"There is fundamental agreement between all sides ... The difference is the mechanics how to implement it," he said.
The United Nations is scheduled to deliver recommendations of its own for how to handle Kirkuk some time after mid-April.
The U.N. report on territory disputes between Iraq's Kurds and other communities, primarily in Kirkuk, was originally supposed to be published by October last year, but it was postponed because of the sensitivity of the subject.
A senior U.N. official dismissed what he called speculation in the media over the contents of the report -- which he said were "not finished ... very much work in progress".
One report, quoting diplomats in Kirkuk close to the process, said the U.N. would recommmend a power-sharing deal between both Iraq's central government and the Kurdish government in Arbil giving them joint jurisdiction over Kirkuk.
The other option would recommend making Kirkuk autonomous but reliant on Baghdad for its budget, it said.
"I don't know precisely which options will be in the final version and which will not, and certainly not how we will formulate them," the senior U.N. official said.
The masked face with its feathers of hair glares from the instep. And the savage hybrid of a shoe mixes python straps and a sky-high heel with beads, wooden pearls, a cord and a tassel.
When it appeared on the runway at the Louis Vuitton show in October, who could have believed that the fantastical footwear — selling at €1,250 to €2,250 (about $1,650 to $3,000) a pair — could be the hottest item for summer 2009?
No wonder that the designer Marc Jacobs baptized it the “Spicy,” giving a name to the shoe, as had previously been the custom with the now-fading It bags.
To spice up this footwear, the designer added everything but the kitchen sink — as long as it was out of Africa. Snakeskin, plumes and semiprecious stones set the tone for a shoe that was inspired by Josephine Baker, the famous singer and dancer of 1920s Paris. She resonated with the exotica that was prevalent in a period when the Ballets Russes had set off one fashion trend and the discovery of Egyptian mummies another.
But the surprising thing about the 2009 spring season, where African style is a drumbeat through clothes and accessories, is that it isn’t about the ethnic.
Instead, it is the sculpted, geometric shapes of Africa and its rich, spicy colors that are the strongest forms of identity.
John Galliano brought Africana to Dior, once again by the shoes, which had fertility symbols carved into high heels. But it was the sculpted hairdos by the couture coiffeur Orlando Pita that made the most powerful impact, along with the weave-effect textures of dresses that were pure Parisian.
Fabric was the story at many shows, starting with the animal prints revisited — but in bright hues — at Lanvin. That echoed an African theme that had been seen in early designs, from Yves Saint Laurent in the 1960s to Naomi Campbell walking the runway for Dolce & Gabbana in 2004 in a leopard-print dress.
The most dramatic example of tribal fabrics was offered by the Japanese designer Junya Watanabe. He came up with bold prints in an African palette of big-sky blue, burnt orange, earth brown and leaf green. Those fabrics were made into pretty summer dresses, while heads wrapped with bunches of wildflowers sweetened the mix.
Africa has had many moments in the fashion sun. Those YSL gowns even had pointed breastplates, long before Jean Paul Gaultier promoted that idea on Madonna.
When the Josephine Baker shows were in Paris vaudeville, ivory bangles climbed up fashionable arms.
The colonial world has also been mined for inspiration. The heat-and-dust colors of stone gray and sand beige, with a hint of military khaki, produced another African scenario. For Hermès, that meant re-creating the effect of desert sands on the surface of rippling suede dresses. For Ralph Lauren, the colonial looks fell somewhere between India and Africa, with low-crotch pants — those sarouel and jodhpur styles that are so à la mode this summer.
Accessories with an African stamp work best for summer in the city, as well as on vacation. Necklaces with a faintly tribal feel look great when in graphic shapes. Bangles are everywhere, from wide cuffs to narrow bracelets, mostly in inventive modern materials to emulate the ivory and horn of now-endangered species.
Bags have just a hint of the wild in their serpent skins or with other natural materials like galuchat (a type of fish skin) or stout saddle leather. For the smaller clutches, a few beads threaded on a cord are sufficient to pass the message — without resorting to the heavy embellishments that are going out of fashion.
But it is the shoes that are leading the forward march of African style — if you can get your hands on them. Chloë Sevigny is one Hollywood star who has managed to get her feet into the Vuitton Spicy shoe, thereby creating a celebrity gold rush for the footwear. The demand is all the more piquant because no pair of these shoes is alike, enforcing a desire for the unique, handcrafted object in which Africa itself excels.
A claim alleging that the Crown's actions have all but seen Maori sports disappear from the landscape has been accepted for inquiry by the Waitangi Tribunal.
Likening takaro Maori (sports) to taonga, cultural expert Harko Brown - who considers takaro Maori to be taonga - lodged the claim, saying that earlier Crown practices had systematically undermined Maori sport.
As a result iwi were prejudicially affected, which was a breach of the Treaty of Waitangi. Sports such as ki o rahi - a fast-paced contact ball sport - had been played in Italy and France, after being introduced by Maori soldiers during World War II.
A French tournament was planned for next year, and the game was catching on in the United States, Mr Brown said. While an estimated 30 schools played the game here, it has virtually no profile.
"The thing that brasses me off is that our taonga are used big time overseas, but we're not really using them here. It's a big void," he said.
Mr Brown, who is also a teacher, said the claim's remedy was simple: the tribunal should recommend that every school have a traditional games policy so that all Kiwi children could play. "This could happen at Sparc level. Spend a lousy couple of million or half a per cent of their budget on these games."
The purpose of some Maori games had been misconceived almost from the beginning of colonisation when missionaries mistook as a religious rite some games using central pou, or a pillar, being hit by a long poi.
"They thought it was some sort of religion around phallic symbols. They didn't like that."
The claim was about having space for things Maori in schools, he said. "Maori have focused on the whenua but some of this intrinsic stuff to who we are gets forgotten. It's about social justice really."
It's news to no one that France's blighted unemployment-ravaged suburban housing projects have disproportionately high black and Arab populations. It's also no scoop that those same two ethnic groups are under-represented in the nation's elite schools, corporate management ranks and political establishment. The French themselves are acutely aware that racial discrimination is a problem — and since the 2005 suburban riots have appeared eager to do something to remedy it.
A good place to start might be figuring out the exact size and location of France's ethnic groups. Except that every time someone proposes including ethnic data within national statistics all hell breaks lose. The accepted wisdom in France, it seems, is that acknowledging difference, and naming it, is bigotry itself. (See pictures of Paris expanding.)
"Ethnic statistics, affirmative action [and] quotas are caricatures," fumed Fadela Amara, France's Secretary of State for Urban Affairs, who before entering government led a civil rights movement advancing minority and feminist causes. The daughter of Algerian immigrants, Amara sees official ethnic statistics as dangerous, not helpful. "Our republic must not become a mosaic of communities," she says, rejecting calls to add race to the gender, age and occupational categories contained in official data researchers use to study French society. "No one should again have to wear a yellow star."
Linking the ethnic make-up of a multiracial nation to genocide may sound like hyperbole elsewhere, but the French know that tinkering with the founding principles and universal values of the nation was central to some of the ugliest episodes in the country's history. The French constitution proudly declares the country "an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic [that] assures equality before the law for all its citizens, without distinction of origin, of race, or religion". That gender- and color-blindness, national ideology holds, protects minority populations by ignoring the differences that divide them into often mutually hostile groups in societies like the U.S. and U.K. Indeed, few words are uttered in France with the same disdain as communitarisme: the proud identification with a component group within wider society so beloved in multi-cultural nations. (See pictures of 40 years of Concorde.)
France's indivisible ideology is noble in theory — but often mocked by reality. There are plenty of periods in French history where racial and religious discrimination were rife — from the colonial era to cooperation with Nazi occupiers. The 2005 rioting that spread across France's suburban housing projects — and the international media attention that it drew — provided another reminder that something was seriously wrong in the land of fraternité et egalité. That unrest seems to have finally provoked a period of soul searching in France.
That means re-examining some of France's founding principles. President Nicolas Sarkozy, for one, has broken ancient taboos by suggesting France study American-style equal opportunity, quotas and the use of ethnic data within official statistics to get a more accurate picture of the nation's face. "There are two Frances," Arab-French businessman Yazid Sabeg told the daily Libération. "One wants to look things in the face — meaning the way demographics in this country have changed. The other is conservative France, which is prone to immobility in the name of largely artificial equality." (See pictures of France's Bastille Day celebrations.)
Tapped by Sarkozy in November to suggest ways of mending the nation's race relations, Sabeg has proposed compiling and analyzing racial statistics as one of several ways of making the nation's anti-discrimination initiatives and laws stronger and more easily applied.
But that's prompted a backlash from opponents who believe the goal should be getting France to practice the color-blind promise of the Republic — not swapping it for U.S.-style multiculturalism and affirmative action. "Even if it's out to do the right thing, positive discrimination remains discrimination, and classifying people by race and ethnicity is in a manner itself racism," argues Malek Boutih, former head of France's seminal civil rights group S.O.S. Racism, and now a member of the Socialist Party's national bureau. "You don't surrender your principles because they are being abused in practice, but rather find ways to shape reality to your principles. You can't give into one discrimination by creating counter-discrimination."
That's a view widely held across French society. But in a sign of change, more and more voices are speaking up to support Sarkozy's and Sabeg's ideas. The number of minority characters on television, film and in the media generally has noticeably increased over the past few years. People in other industries have begun pointing out the practical problems created by the legal ban on including ethnic data in official statistics. "From a sociological point of view, I'm for it, just as I'd be inclined to include any qualitative statistic as revelatory and essential to social, political and economic evolution as race is," says Dominique Reynié, president of the Foundation for Political Development, a think tank in Paris. "It's not just a valuable tool — it's one that may offer ways of combating discrimination."
It would also at last let France see its real face clearly. France's highly centralized government and top-to-bottom administration can keep tabs on myriad ways its 64.1 million population is evolving except in terms of its racial make-up. The prohibition on using ethnic or religious data — even if volunteered — means France can do no better than estimate that its population includes 4 to 7 million Arabs, 3 to 5 million blacks, some 1.5 million Asians, and around 600,000 Jews. (See TIME's pictures of the week.)
Using the highest of those estimates, those four categories represent nearly 22% of France's population — a group that includes arguably the biggest victims of racism and discrimination. The vast majority of French people want to change that. The question is how.
Nearly half of the children of internally displaced ethnic Kurds in Turkey are unable to attend school and other minorities face institutional discrimination in education, a report said on Monday.
Nurcan Kaya, author of the report by Minority Rights Group International, said a failure to provide equal access to education for children from non-Turkish backgrounds could hamper the country's bid to join the European Union, which has called on Turkey to expand cultural rights for its ethnic minorities.
"The discrepancy between EU standards on education for minorities and those in Turkey will ultimately affect Turkey's efforts to join the EU," Kaya said at a news conference.
"The EU should give this issue greater priority during Turkey's accession process," she said.
Turkey only recognises Greeks, Armenians and Jews as minorities under a treaty that ended World War One and doesn't afford special rights to other ethnic or religious groups, including Kurds, who make up about 20 percent of the population, Roma, Syriac Christians, Alevi Muslims and others.
Millions of Kurds over the last three decades have left the countryside in southeast Turkey for urban centres to find work and escape fighting between the army and Kurdish separatists.
Forty-eight percent of these families questioned said they were unable to send their children to school after moving, citing poverty as the main obstacle, according to the London-based NGO's report, which was funded by the EU.
Literacy rates are 73 percent in the mainly Kurdish southeast, compared to 87 percent in the country's more affluent west, the report said. Only 60 percent of women are able to read in the Kurdish region, it also said.
Turkey has eased restrictions on the Kurdish language, which was completely banned until 1991, and language courses are now available at a handful of universities.
Kurdish children, as well as other ethnic groups, who attend state school are unable to study their mother tongue, the report concluded.
Officially recognised minorities operate their own schools and are able to teach some classes in Greek or Armenian, but are given as little as $1 per student annually in financial assistance from the government, said Garo Paylan of the Armenian Foundation Schools at the news conference.
Minority schools are unable to find properly trained teachers and updated textbooks, he said. A Turkish assistant principal employed by the Education Ministry is the main authority at the schools.
Religious education that teaches the Sunni Hanafi creed of Islam remains mandatory in state schools and non-adherents can only opt out of classes if they disclose their faith, which violates Turkey's secular constitution, the report said.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled last year that religion classes in Turkey's state schools violate pluralism in a case brought by an Alevi father.
See also:
about Alevi
Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom on Wednesday rejected a charge by his Romanian counterpart Traian Basescu that he had not respected Romania's constitution.
In a television interview on Tuesday, Basescu accused Solyom of failing to respect the Romanian constitution. The Romanian president said that Hungarian officials were welcomed in his country but none of them should make any statement incompatible with the Romanian constitution.
Referring to the interview, Solyom said on Wednesday that whenever he speaks about the rights of Hungarian communities beyond the border, he always expresses endeavours that comply with the European norms and practices and are compatible with the constitutional order of the given country.
Solyom was to travel to Targu Mures, a city in western Romania's Transylvania region inhabited by many ethnic Hungarians to attend celebrations on March 15, Hungary's national holiday. The Romanian authorities, however, withdrew the landing permit of his plane so the president had to bring forward his visit by one day and travel to Transylvania by car.
Hungarian Foreign Affairs Spokesman Lajos Szelestey said earlier today that the two countries should step beyond the problems related to Solyom's recent visit.
"In view of our ties within NATO and the EU, our good neighbourly relations and the minorities living in both countries, we say now that we should look ahead, and try to find the opportunities for further cooperation," he said.
See also:
March 15 in Budapest
Radical nationalist Magyar Garda inducts 650 new members
| Budapest Times March 15 | |
The Magyar Garda, a radical nationalist movement, inducted 650 new members at an event attended by its supporters in Budapest's Heroes' Square on Sunday afternoon. Gabor Vona, the founding chairman of the Magyar Garda and head of the Jobbik party, said the movement's members would "write a new chapter in Hungarian history". Lorant Hegedus Jr, a priest of the Reform Church, said in a speech that the government was the "darkest and dirtiest in world history" and was sending a "breed which hides under the subculture to attack the Hungarian people." Magyar Garda Captain General Robert Kiss said guard members embodied "Hungary's living conscience".  Police set up a double cordon around the square and around 1,500 people stood around the cordon holding Magyar Garda flags and red and white Arpad-striped flags, associated with Hungary's WWII Nazi regime.Several hundred riot police stood alert in the area. Police also checked some of the supporters' IDs. The Magyar Garda was registered as an organisation to "protect the country's heritage and culture" in June 2007 with the aim to establish "the framework for national defence". The first 56 members of the movement were inducted in August 2007. In December last year, a Budapest court ruled that the organisation must be disbanded, a ruling which the Magyar Garda is in the process of appealing.  Radical nationalist Jobbik party holds rally in C Budapest Over 4,000 supporters of the radical nationalist Jobbik party gathered in Budapest's downtown Deak Square on Sunday afternoon, to mark Hungary's March 15 national holiday. Krisztina Morvai, who is leading the party's list for the upcoming European Parliamentary elections, said her party would make every effort to "regain national assets illicitly given away" and added that all laws should be abolished that "granted privileges to foreigners to the detriment of Hungarians." Morvai, calling Hungary's government a "gang of robbers" also said that loans taken from the International Monetary Fund and other international banks were to be considered as repaid and Hungary would not make any further payments in debt service. After the rally, police called on a crowd of some 1,500 people, who stayed, to disperse. MTI's on-site correspondent reported that riot police were trying to force the crowd, many of whom were wearing masks, to leave. Water cannons were also deployed in the area. |
No expense was spared as a magnificent 'winter wonderland' production created the backdrop for the Spanish-born designer's autumn/winter 09/10 collection.
The ethnic mix showed luxurious sparkling gowns covered in sequins, creating folk-like and feminine designs to make every woman feel like a goddess.
The fairytale continued with models ornamented with jingling coins and veils as they sashayed down the catwalk lit with strobe lighting.
Although the collection might not have been the most practical apparel for a cold winter evening, the designer - who was raised in Britain - managed to show he's still one of the most influential fashion designers of our time.
"The gypsy-like models decked out in 'ice princess' attire were inspired by Galliano's love for Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Turkey and Cyprus" .
- What does it mean "gypsy-like models"?
- What does it mean "love for Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Turkey and Cyprus"? How the "gypsies" from those countries are (in comparison with those from Spain etc.)?
See also, Vivienne Westwood's catwalk image of Roma
The State Language Act amendment approved by the Government on Wednesday won't restrict the rights of ethnic minorities to use their language, Parliamentary chairman Pavol Paska said following talks with his Hungarian counterpart Katalin Szili in the village of Bela (Nitra region) on Thursday.
"Let us defend our national language at home, it's quite common even by larger nations in Europe," said Paska.
Paska appreciated the meeting for its openness. "Formerly, I used to have a feeling that I'm standing in the dock," said Paska, adding that Slovakia is able to respond to all questions Hungary raises, but currently its foremost concern is to focus on bolstering the economic situation of all people living in the country, without regard to their nationality.
Conversely, Szili expressed Hungary's concerns about the Government-proposed bill toughening up use of the ethnic minorities languages.
"The words of Mr. Chairman are a guarantee that no elements restricting the rights of ethnic minorities to use their language will appear in the final version of the bill," said Szili.
The chairs also agreed on future talks of the constitutional and foreign affairs parliamentary committees of the two countries, which are expected to resolve issues surrounding the legal status of the ethnic minorities in both Slovakia and Hungary. Paska and Szili are to meet in June again in order to evaluate the results of the co-operation.
Just five students of black Caribbean origin started at Oxford this year; at Cambridge there are eight
Students at Oxford University. Photograph: Graham Turner
Oxford and Cambridge universities are still failing to increase significantly the number of places given to ethnic minority students, despite being given nearly £1m a year each by the government to widen access.
The latest admissions statistics show that just five out of more than 3,000 students who started at Oxford this year are black Caribbean in origin, while the equivalent figure at Cambridge is eight.
The UK's most ancient universities are under political pressure to open up access to a wider range of students and both have increased the proportion of students from state schools this year, but black Caribbeans remain a very small proportion of undergraduates at both universities.
At Oxford, applications from Indian and Chinese UK students actually fell, with a corresponding decline in the numbers gaining entry.
At Oxford, the entry for October 2008 included five black Caribbean students (the same as the previous year) among a total intake of 3,170 including overseas students. A further 10 were described as white and black Caribbean. The 65 Indian students were the largest minority among the 2,683 home students, but that was 20 fewer than in 2007.
There were 37 Chinese students, again down on the previous year, 17 Pakistani and 24 black African. There were 74 white and Asian students accepted and three Bangladeshis (up from one the year before).
With more than four students applying for every place, competition is intense and the success rate among ethnic minority UK students is nearly 29%, compared with an overall average of 23.7%, but it remains below the hit rate of independent school candidates which is 29.4%.
Cambridge is due to publish its latest admissions figures later this month and they will show a similar ethnic mix among home students. There were eight black Caribbean, 20 black African, 116 Indian, 95 Chinese, 16 Pakistani and six Bangladeshi students. There is a very similar 27% success rate among ethnic minority applicants to Cambridge.
Both universities say they cannot select ethnic minority students if they do not apply and insist they are making strenuous efforts to attract more applications.
A spokeswoman for Oxford said: "The university is committed to attracting, selecting and supporting students from any race or background."
Most outreach activities are open to students from all backgrounds but the universities also conduct schemes specifically for ethnic minorities. For example, St Anne's College works with the National Black Boys Can Association.
The number of home students from Indian families who applied for 2008 fell from 389 to 338, and the pattern was repeated for Chinese students with a decline from 206 to 186. Inevitably, fewer from these communities are now Oxford undergraduates.
Cambridge said the Group to Encourage Ethnic Minority Applications programme, which was set up in 1989 as a joint venture by students and the colleges, had succeeded in pushing up the numbers of ethnic minority students from 5.5% to 15.5% over two decades.
Oxford admissions statistics will also be scrutinised by schools and parents for clues as to which subjects will give students the best chance of success when they apply.
Classics emerges as the comparatively easy option with a success rate of 47% (55% for men), followed by geology and materials science, which are smaller courses.
Most competitive is the economics and management degree, followed by engineering, economics and management, and a law degree which includes a year of study at a European university.
Italy has been transformed in recent decades from a nation of emigrants to a target country for mass immigration. Aidan Lewis reports on the Italian government's response to the tensions that have ensued, and the concerns raised by human rights groups and Italy's European partners.
Edward Ampadu stands with his companions in a damp, abandoned factory that is home for the winter to more than 600 African immigrants.
There is just one tap, and the men are living in shelters made from cardboard boxes, squatting while they look for work picking citrus fruit in the fields of Calabria, on the country's southern toe.
"Everybody here is struggling," says Edward, a 42-year-old from Ghana. A poor harvest means fewer jobs to go round this year, he says, and the migrants say they need help to survive.
"We are appealing to the authorities. They know that people are here, and therefore they need to help."
These agricultural workers illustrate the challenges facing a wandering, immigrant underclass in Italy.
But while the migrants look to Rome for help, Rome looks to Europe.
Italy and other "frontline" Mediterranean countries have been offered little help as they struggle with an issue that concerns all of Europe, the government says.
Its reaction to the problem, meanwhile, has drawn sharp criticism from human rights groups and European institutions.
Amid public alarm over an immigrant influx it has sent soldiers on to the streets, fingerprinted Roma (Gypsy) communities, and encouraged rapid expulsions and repatriations.
Some observers say Italy's recent focus on border controls and security neglects integration policy, at a time when the immigrant population has grown to more than four million, almost 7% of the total.
"Italy's becoming a caricature," said Sergio Carrera, a research fellow at the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies.
"It's becoming the example of a very extreme political discourse framing migration as a security issue, and justifying the implementation of very restrictive policies, having huge implications for human rights, fundamental rights, and social inclusion."
Sea patrols
Immigration is now an emotive, front-page issue in Italy, and a rallying cry for the Northern League, a partner in Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right government.
The focus of media attention is often Lampedusa, the tiny Italian island south of Sicily that is the arrival point for most of those - including many of the farm workers in Calabria - who complete the journey from North Africa.
Analysts say those arriving by sea make up only a fraction of total annual arrivals, and that most irregular immigrants in Italy enter legally then overstay.
But the government points out that the estimated 36,000 would-be immigrants landing on Italy's shores last year accounted for more than half the irregular entries to Europe by sea.
Roberto Maroni, Italy's Northern League interior minister, said in January that 2009 would mark the "end of the landings", promising that a long-awaited pact to patrol coasts with former colony Libya would come into effect.
To the anger of islanders and immigrants, who both staged protests, he also announced that all adults would be kept on Lampedusa while asylum requests were processed. This quickly led to severe overcrowding and the decision was reversed, but concern remains over conditions on the island, and alleged political pressure for rapid expulsions.
Together with Greece, Malta and Cyprus, Mr Maroni also issued a new plea for the EU to "make a more effective effort" at stemming the flow of immigrants, including through its recently established border patrol agency, Frontex.
"We believe that [border] security in the Mediterranean is directly connected to the security of the whole European Union," he said.
Frontex ran 150 days of joint sea patrols in the central Mediterranean in 2008.
In a separate initiative earlier last month, EU external relations commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner offered Libya 20m euros (£18m) to help boost border controls.
Security bill
Italy's hardline approach to immigration policy is not unique, says Hugo Brady, an expert at the Centre for European Reform in London.
"In the main they only reflect sentiments which can be seen in a lot of other West European countries - that the time for tolerant immigration policy in their mind is past," he says.
Even so, he said the Italians had been "marked out by their extremity".
Among the measures that have caused concern among EU partners is the Italian government's decision to declare a state of emergency in Rome, Milan and Naples last summer, deploying troops in the streets as part of a crackdown on illegal immigration.
Last month, an emergency decree designed to tackle rapes - many of which have been blamed on immigrants - gave official blessing to the formation of citizens' street patrols.
A security bill awaiting final approval in the Italian parliament also contains several controversial provisions, including:
Thomas Hammarberg, Commissioner for Human Rights at the Council of Europe, a pan-European body that promotes democratic principles, says he is worried about a decision to extend the deployment of troops on the streets.
"We're talking about police functions here," he said. "It just dramatises the problems and tends to lead to hysteria."
'European solution'
Asked to justify the government's security-focused approach to immigration, Mr Maroni cites crime statistics for 2007.
"The percentage of crimes linked to non-Italians was more than 35% and the non-Italians do not account for 35% of the people in Italy," he says.
"All interpretations are legitimate. My concern as interior minister is to guarantee the highest possible levels of security, first and foremost by combating clandestine immigration."
On some issues the government has been forced to back down, under pressure from the EU.
These include a provision for the expulsion of EU citizens that was devised for Romanian Roma and judged to clash with European rules on free movement.
It was withdrawn last year after the European Commission threatened to start infringement proceedings.
Italian policies are coming under increasing scrutiny as the EU struggles against concerns over sovereignty to devise a common immigration approach, analysts say.
In October EU states took a step towards this by signing a non-binding immigration pact that encourages readmission treaties with countries of origin, selective immigration, and an end to mass amnesties for illegal immigrants of the kind introduced in Spain and Italy.
But for some human rights activists, the EU needs to play a firmer role protecting immigrants in member states and backing integration.
Mr Hammarberg criticises Italy's criminalising of immigrants as the "wrong approach".
"I think it is beginning to spread that there is a need for a European solution," he says.
"The situation with Greece and Italy in particular calls for a much faster process of integrating the European countries' policies on migration, so that you don't have a competition downwards where people introduce fairly draconian policies in order to avoid people coming to their country."
See also:
Time on-line: Pope urges Romans to "welcome" immigrants
Over 80 percent of people asked in a recent survey were prejudiced against the Roma, Nepszava reports, quoting pollster Median.
Four fifths of the sample said that "Gypsies make no effort to fit into society."
Almost 60 percent of the respondents openly said that they thought "crime was in the blood of Gypsies," and 36 percent said that the Roma should be "separated from the rest of society".
The survey also established a correlation between citizens' political views and their attitude towards the Roma minority: the closer a respondent was to the far right, the more anti-Roma he was.
Median also noted that it was people of modest incomes in small villages that appeared the least intolerant of their Roma neighbours.
Hungary's Roma population is estimated at around 600,000. Only about 100,000 declared themselves to be ethnic Roma during the minority government elections in 2006, said the paper.
The paper also pointed out that while in the 1980s 70-80 percent of Roma men were employed, only 28 percent of them had jobs in 1993 -- the situation having stagnated or even deteriorated since then.
Everyone knows Transylvania as the home of the vampire count. But he wasn't the only interesting character to come from this area, says Marcus Tanner
Sunday, 1 March 2009
AP
The medieval city of Sibiu is a good base from which to explore Saxon Transylvania
The woman from Barclays was sharp with me down the phone line to Deva, an uninviting-looking town in the middle of Transylvania. "You should have told us you were going to Romania," she tut-tutted. "It's on our black list for identity theft and fraud. That's why we blocked your card." Thanks, I thought. There I was in the middle of nowhere, having hopped off the train on the trail of a 15th-century king I was writing a book about, and I couldn't get any money from the ATM.
I hurried on to the local castle at Hunedoara, hoping that the bank would have sorted my cash crisis by dinnertime. In the meantime I tried to forget money and lose myself in the Gothic turrets, battlements, moat and drawbridge. Hunedoara castle was once the childhood home of Matthias Hunyadi, one-time king of Hungary and a personal hero of mine, not so much for his extensive military conquests but his other activities.
Impressed with the example of Julius Caesar, emperor and writer, Matthias had laid aside his weapons in the 1480s, when he was getting on, and concentrated on high culture, building up one of the great libraries of Renaissance Europe and filling his court with philosophers, writers, artists and singers from every part of Europe. With his puissant Italian consort Beatrice at his side, he presided over a true golden age, whose legacy was smashed to smithereens when the Ottomans invaded Hungary in the 1520s, some years after Matthias's death.
During his own lifetime, Matthias dropped his family name of Hunyadi and styled himself Corvinus, "the Raven", and his castle in Transylvania, not far from where he was born, is full of raven motifs carved in stone.
Ravens apart, there were not many other signs that this had been the childhood home of a great monarch. Instead, the main exhibition was a waxwork collection of famous world personalities, including a stout-looking Lady Di dressed in eau-de-nil evening gown and tiara. A crowd of Romanian tourists bustled past, shepherded by their Orthodox priest, pausing briefly to stare briefly at Di and her waxwork companion, Osama bin Laden.
I left, a little disappointed. I'd tramped round much of Europe, looking for the remnants of the king's famous library scattered around Hungary, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Austria, and indeed England. But Transylvania was his "home turf", so to speak, and it was here I had hoped to come across more tangible relics of his life.
But as the silence surrounding his name in the castle had showed, this wasn't going to be easy, because Transylvania is contested land. Like Kosovo, or Northern Ireland, one nation is in possession of the turf, but another questions that fact.
In Transylvania, that "other" is the Hungarians, overlords of Transylvania until the First World War and disconsolate and unwilling citizens of Romania ever since. The Romanians pay that Hungarian resentment back in kind, resolutely ignoring the Hungarian character of Transylvania's ancient monuments – hence Lady Di's precedence over memories of Matthias in the castle.
I pushed on to Cluj, or Koloszvar in Hungarian, one of the jewels in Transylvania's crown, the old centre dominated by a fabulous red-roofed cathedral-sized parish church in which Matthias was almost certainly baptised and near to which stands the squat white townhouse where he was born in the 1440s.
In these shady cobbled side streets with their ivy-clad, sparrow-filled walls, one can see why one British writer in the 1920s drew vague likeness between Cluj and Oxford. But it's Oxford with a vein of ethnic tension.
Back in the 1990s, Cluj laboured under an ultra-nationalist Romanian mayor, named Funar, whose anti-Hungarian rants and campaigns have left their mark – and not just on the town's benches, which he had painted in Romania's national colours.
Mayor Funar also half-ruined the huge statue of Matthias in the main square, undermining the foundations with bizarre and unsightly archaeological digs aimed at unearthing various pots and shovels that would "prove" the antiquity of the Romanian presence in the area.
I felt relieved to leave the memory-laden gothic lanes of Cluj for the open, baroque squares of Timisoara, another Hunyadi family "seat" back in the 15th century and now one of Romania's most cosmopolitan and attractive towns. Arriving at a weekend, I was struck by the continuing devotion of Romanians to their church, because in the Disney-style Orthodox cathedral it was standing room only on Sunday, the huge congregation bulked out by a fair sprinkling of youthful, good-looking back-clad nuns.
While Romanians see Transylvania as the birthplace of their nationality, and Hungarians insist it is the fortress of theirs, making it a case of cradle vs bastion, there was once a third player on Transylvania's ethnic stage. These were the Transylvanian Saxons, once 300,000 strong but now down to a handful of Lutheran pastors and few thousand oldies, like Sam Hutter, bellringer and practically the last Saxon in his once populous village, near Sibiu.
I had swung down to Sibiu to visit the former stamping ground of King Matthias's most infamous houseguest – Dracula. Yes, the prince of darkness not only existed but started out as a protégé of Matthias's father, Janos, who dusted down the hick young Romanian princeling and took him off to the Hungarian court in the 1450s to get spruced up.
But after Janos died, and after the young man's boiling and impaling activities got on everyone's nerves, Matthias had Dracula placed under comfortable house arrest at his summer palace in northern Hungary at Visegrad.
There the captive's luminous eyes and fearsome reputation (much bruited about by Matthias) attracted the attention of curious diplomats, including the papal nuncio who wrote a long description of him to Pope Pius II. The Pontiff was fascinated. "Such is the discrepancy between a man's appearance and his soul!" he wrote.
I'd always thought "Dracula" was a name cooked up by Bram Stoker, but no; Dracula was precisely what Matthias called him, when he wrote to the Saxon burghers of southern Transylvania commending "our friend Dracula" to their tender care as he journeyed home, following his release.
Yet it's a pity that Romania's tourist authorities play so relentlessly on the Dracula cult to the virtual exclusion of all else, for it totally overshadows the more accessible and no less interesting Saxon history of southern Transylvania.
The Saxons may all have gone – all bar Mr Hutter, that is – but their pointy churches enclosed by high walls, built to withstand Ottoman sieges, remain, as do those villages of gingerbread houses, kept from ruin by funds sent from Saxons living in Germany.
Sibiu, which the Saxons called Hermannstadt, and Europe's capital of culture in 2007, is a fine base from which to explore these semi-deserted gems, which now only echo to the ancient German dialect of the Saxons when they return each autumn to their annual festival.
The Saxons never claimed Transylvania as their exclusive property. Not for them talk of cradles or bastions, for which reason the Romanians eye them with less suspicion than the Hungarians. The Romanians of Sibiu are far much more inclined to celebrate the town's Saxon heritage than their counterparts in Cluj are ready to acknowledge their city's Hungarian dimension, for example. They have even elected one of the handful of remaining Saxons in the town as mayor.
Funnily enough, it's the visiting Germans who seem least interested in their Transylvanian kith and kin – those descendants of youngsters who suddenly left the Rhineland for the distant Carpathians far off in the 12th century, so spawning the legend of a sinister pied piper who had lured the children into the dark mountains. "They were all Nazis," a German woman working temporarily for a Roma charity told me, curtly.
Maybe. Certainly, when old Sam Hutter took to me to his village war memorial, to point out a long roll call of Hutters who had died in the service of the upright old Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, I couldn't help notice that a fair number of local Saxons had died rather more recently, in the service of another, less reputable Austrian.
Transylvania, land "beyond the forest", a shifting sort of place, not always as comfortable as its name might suggest. But one evening, standing in a grass meadow outside the old Saxon church where the German woman had started telling me about the Nazis, what really impressed was the mysterious beauty of the place – golden sunset, old church, dark forest.
There are still bears and wolves in the immense forests of Transylvania though I didn't see any. But I did see a real raven, with a huge wingspan, gliding on the air currents from the churchyard where I stood across the valley below towards the dark green forest where it disappeared. And I thought of Matthias who'd chosen that dark, unknowable bird for his emblem, possibly after watching one gliding across a valley toward the forest in much the same way as I had, years ago.
