Authors

Andreea Carstocea¹;  ¹ European Centre for Minority Issues, Germany

Discussion

Public health measures instituted during the Covid-19 pandemic included both social distancing measures (including lockdowns), as well as personal hygiene measures (i.e., washing hands frequently, using disinfectant, wearing a mask etc), with the purpose of preventing the spread of the corona virus.

I argue that these measures both deepened socio-economic inequalities and reinforced the social exclusion of Roma communities. This article is based on primary data obtained in the course of the project ‘Marginality on the Margins of Europe – The Impact of COVID-19 on Roma Communities in Non-EU Countries in Eastern Europe’, assessing the overall impact of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic on Roma communities in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Ukraine.

Existing spatial deprivation and poor housing quality in many Roma homes limited the extent to which Roma people were able to obey both social distancing rules and the measures regulating personal hygiene. Overcrowded homes, the inability to afford masks or disinfectant, being cut off from utilities etc., hindered compliance with public health regulations. These factors were used to depict entire Roma communities as both lacking in personal hygiene and as non-compliant with public health rules. The narratives constructed in mass-media accentuated the alleged gap between majorities (rule-obeying, clean, ‘pure’), and Roma communities, whose constructedness as lacking in discipline (and hence being ‘ungovernable’) and personal hygiene (the Roma being often described as ‘dirty’) reinforced social identities and socio-economic hierarchies, and so rationalized exclusion.

The consequence was that entire Roma communities found themselves locked, under police or military guard; the interviews carried out described cases where hospitals refused to treat patients of Roma background, due to fears they might carry the virus. Here the boundaries between the discursively ‘clean’ and ‘morally upright’ majorities and the ‘dirty’ and ‘ungovernable’ minorities are not only dramatically reinforced, but take physical form, demonstrating how easily slippage takes place between the exclusion of “dirt” and the exclusion of “dirty people”.