Roma and non-Roma citizens celebrate the International Roma Day in Spain

Date 9 April 2014 Author Ana Segovia Montoya Category Uncategorised

Ana Segovia /Spain

Almost 800.000 Roma citizens live in Spain and yesterday they celebrated the International Roma Day, one special opportunity to show Spanish population that discrimination and segregation is not the way of promoting peaceful relations between the different social and ethnic groups in this country.

The actions started early in the morning in Madrid, where FSG invited others organizations for celebrating this important day. At the same time in others cities, FSG members from the different offices around the country celebrated this day, Barcelona, Jaen or Seville were some examples.
An extraordinary plenary session of the State Council of the Roma People was the opening in Madrid for an interesting day. After the plenary session, organized by the Ministry for Health, Policy and Equality, many Roma organization went near the Manzanares River where most of them threw into the river flower petals, in front of Media and another Spanish citizens to commemorate those Roma who left India many years ago.

Another interesting initiative was the campaign “Absurd Prejudices” , many Roma and non Roma population joined the campaign using disparate ideas for making reference about different sectors of society, for example elderly people. With this initiative people posted in social media ideas that they had, “Don´t you trust elderly people”, as one of the motos that they used for this campaign. Like this, FSG showed civil society how Roma population feel when the rest of the Spanish citizens discriminate and judge them just because they are Roma. “Absurd Prejudices” concluded with a demonstration organized in Madrid requesting to end with discrimination and prejudices.

Finally, one of the most brilliant moments was at night, one member from the FSG appeared in a very famous TV show broadcasted in prime time. Mari Carmen Cortés, spokesperson of the Area of Equality from FSG, clearly spoke and in a very fair manner about Roma situation in Spain and reminded the Media the major role which they play about discrimination and racism with Roma citizens. Cortés included in her speech that Roma are not a marginal but little known culture by civil society.