Roma sociologist and activist Nicolae Gheorghe dies aged 66

DAMIAN LE BAS

Editor

Above: Romani sociologist and political activist Nicolae Gheorghe, who has died aged 66. Photograph: TheRomaniElders.org

THE ROMANIAN Roma sociologist and political activist Nicolae Gheorghe has died.

Gheorghe passed away on Thursday, 8th August. He was 66 years old.

Nicolae Gheorghe was born in Rosiori de Vede, Romania, in 1946. In his youth he mixed frequently with non-Roma, attending a military school near Buchurest before going to university to study Philosophy and Sociology. He graduated at the top of his class.

Following work with Romania's National Commission for Demography in the 1970s, Gheorghe began to lobby for better integration of the Roma. The Securitate- the secret police of Communist Romania- became interested in his movements and investigated him.

After the fall of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, Gheorghe was instrumental in forming the Democratic Union of Roma and later the Romani Criss, the latter becoming one of the most prominent Roma NGOs in Europe. He masterminded the 1995 campaign for 'Roma' to become the official term for the minority in Romania, which was finally achieved in 1999.

Alongside his political activism, Gheorghe published many books and scholarly articles, working alongside other experts in the field such as Jean-Pierre Liégeois and Thomas Acton. He wrote of the need for Romani people to discover their own identities instead of having them forced upon them from outside, a process he called "ethnogenesis".

Gheorghe's activism was felt across Europe. In 2010 he wrote in The Guardian that the French closure of Roma camps may have been legal but was "morally illegitimate", and regarding his homeland that " "Getting rid of the Gypsies" has been part of the Romanian's psyche since the second world war deportations."

Dezideriu Gergely has written of Gheorghe on the website of the European Roma Rights Centre that: "His legacy is seen in the following generations of Roma activists who continue to fight on, inspired by his example. Gheorghe was a role model - he dedicated his entire life fighting for the Roma cause and particularly for unity. He taught us that differences must unite us."

Quotes from Nicolae Gheorghe, taken from TheRomaniElders website:

“Being Romanian no longer meant being a citizen of the Romanian State who is integrated into the social development and feels bound to it. Rather, one suddenly was confronted with terms such as blood, heirs and ancestors. I however had a hard time stating that my predecessors had been Dakers or Romans. I knew that it wasn’t true and that it made me differ from other Romanians. My predecessors were Gypsies. I grew angry and started to ask: Who am I really?”

“Roma politics must be dealt with in relation to general human rights; it must be related to common values and moral codes and must not focus on an exclusively ethnic or national problem. I thus prefer a course of action that doesn’t pass by international human rights standards nor their according institutions and organisations.”

“We are people without any ethnic territory on kin-state of our own. One consequence of this reality is that our cultural identity and our status as a distinct ethnic minority were hardly recognized in the public life.”

“I grew up with the idea I am a cigan (Gypsy), I was taught to be Romanian ... I want to die as a Human person.”