title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: When the SDU is first powered on, it attempts to connect with the Inmarsat network by transmitting a log-on request, which is acknowledged by the ground station. This is partly to determine whether the SDU belongs to an active service subscriber, and also to identify which satellite should be used for transmitting messages to the SDU. After connecting, if no further contact has been received from the data terminal (the SDU) for one hour, the ground station transmits a "log-on interrogation" message, commonly referred to as a "ping"; if the terminal is active, it will respond to the ping automatically. The entire process of interrogating the terminal is referred to as a "handshake".


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Although the ACARS data link on Flight 370 stopped functioning between 01:07 and 02:03 MYT (most likely around the same time the plane lost contact by secondary radar), the SDU remained operative. After last contact by primary radar west of Malaysia, the following events were recorded in the log of Inmarsat's ground station at Perth, Western Australia (all times are MYT/UTC+8):


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: A few inferences can be made from the satellite communications. The first is that the aircraft remained operational until at least 08:19 MYT—seven hours after final contact was made with air traffic control over the South China Sea. The varying burst frequency offset (BFO) values indicate the aircraft was moving at speed. The aircraft's SDU needs location and track information to keep its antenna pointed towards the satellite, so it can also be inferred that the aircraft's navigation system was operational.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Since the aircraft did not respond to a ping at 09:15, it can be concluded that at some point between 08:19 and 09:15, the aircraft lost the ability to communicate with the ground station. The log-on message sent from the aircraft at 08:19:29 was "log-on request"; there are only a few reasons the SDU would transmit this request, such as a power interruption, software failure, loss of critical systems providing input to the SDU, or a loss of the link due to the aircraft's attitude. Investigators consider the most likely reason to be that it was sent during power-up after an electrical outage.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: At 08:19, the aircraft had been airborne for 7 hours and 38 minutes; the typical Kuala Lumpur-Beijing flight is 5 hours, so fuel exhaustion was likely. In the event of fuel exhaustion and engine flame-out, which would eliminate power to the SDU, the aircraft's ram air turbine (RAT) would deploy, providing power to some instruments and flight controls, including the SDU. Approximately 90 seconds after the 02:25 handshake—also a log-on request—communications from the aircraft's in-flight entertainment system were recorded in the ground station log. Similar messages would be expected following the 08:19 handshake, but none were received, supporting the fuel-exhaustion scenario.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Two parameters associated with these transmissions that were recorded in a log at the ground station were key to the investigation:


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: By combining the distance between the aircraft and satellite, speed, and heading with aircraft performance constraints (e.g. fuel consumption, possible speeds and altitudes), investigators generated candidate paths that were analysed separately by two methods. The first assumed the aircraft was flying on one of the three autopilot modes (two are further affected by whether the navigation system used magnetic north or true north as a reference), calculated the BTO and BFO values along these routes, and compared them with the values recorded from Flight 370. The second method generated paths which had the aircraft's speed and heading adjusted at the time of each handshake to minimise the difference between the calculated BFO of the path and the values recorded from Flight 370. A probability distribution for each method at the BTO arc of the sixth handshake of the two methods was created and then compared; 80% of the highest probability paths for both analyses combined intersect the BTO arc of the sixth handshake between 32.5°S and 38.1°S, which can be extrapolated to 33.5°S and 38.3°S along the BTO arc of the seventh handshake.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: The SATCOM link functioned normally from pre-flight (beginning at 00:00 MYT) until it responded to a ground-to-air ACARS message with an acknowledge message at 01:07. Ground-to-air ACARS messages continued to be transmitted to Flight 370 until Inmarsat's network sent multiple "Request for Acknowledge" messages at 02:03, without a response from the aircraft. At some time between 01:07 and 02:03, power was lost to the SDU. At 02:25, the aircraft's SDU sent a "log-on request". It is uncommon for a log-on request to be made in-flight, but it could occur for multiple reasons. An analysis of the characteristics and timing of these requests suggest a power interruption in-flight is the most likely culprit.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: An analysis by the ATSB comparing the evidence available for Flight 370 with three categories of accidents—an in-flight upset (e.g., stall), a glide event (e.g., engine failure, fuel exhaustion), and an unresponsive crew or hypoxia event—concluded that an unresponsive crew or hypoxia event "best fit the available evidence" for the five-hour period of the flight as it travelled south over the Indian Ocean without communication or significant deviations in its track, likely on autopilot. No consensus exists among investigators on the unresponsive crew or hypoxia theory. If no control inputs were made following flameout and the disengagement of autopilot, the aircraft would likely have entered a spiral dive and entered the ocean within of the flameout and disengagement of autopilot.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: The analysis of the flaperon showed that the landing flaps were not extended, supporting the spiral dive at high speed theory. In May 2018, the ATSB again asserted that the flight was not in control when it crashed, its spokesperson adding that "We have quite a bit of data to tell us that the aircraft, if it was being controlled at the end, it wasn't very successfully being controlled."


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Two men boarded Flight 370 with stolen passports, which raised suspicion in the immediate aftermath of its disappearance. The passports, one Austrian and one Italian, had been reported stolen in Thailand within the preceding two years. Interpol stated that both passports were listed on its Stolen and Lost Travel Documents (SLTD) database, and that no check had been made against the database since the passports were first reported as stolen. Malaysia's Home Minister, Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, criticised his country's immigration officials for failing to stop the passengers travelling with the stolen European passports. The two one-way tickets purchased for the holders of these passports were booked through China Southern Airlines. It was reported that an Iranian had ordered the cheapest tickets to Europe via telephone in Bangkok, Thailand, and paid by cash. The two passengers were later identified as Iranian men, one aged 19 and the other 29, who had entered Malaysia on 28 February using valid Iranian passports. The two men were believed to be asylum seekers. The Secretary General of Interpol stated that the organisation was "inclined to conclude that it was not a terrorist incident".


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: United States and Malaysian officials reviewed the backgrounds of every passenger named on the manifest. On 18 March, the Chinese government announced that it had checked all of the Chinese citizens on the aircraft and had ruled out the possibility that any were involved in "destruction or terror attacks". One passenger, who worked as a flight engineer for a Swiss jet charter company, was briefly under suspicion as a potential hijacker because he was thought to have the relevant "aviation skills".


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: US officials believe the most likely explanation to be that someone in the cockpit of Flight 370 re-programmed the aircraft's autopilot to travel south across the Indian Ocean. Police searched the homes of the pilots and seized financial records for all 12 crew members, including bank statements, credit card bills and mortgage documents. On 2 April 2014, Malaysia's Police Inspector-General said that more than 170 interviews had been conducted as part of Malaysia's criminal investigation, including interviews with family members of the pilots and crew.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Media reports claimed that Malaysian police had identified Captain Zaharie as the prime suspect, if human intervention were eventually proven to be the cause of Flight 370's disappearance. The United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reconstructed the deleted data from Captain Zaharie's home flight simulator, but a Malaysian government spokesman indicated that "nothing sinister" had been found on it. The preliminary report issued by Malaysia in March 2015 stated that there was "no evidence of recent or imminent significant financial transactions carried out" by any of the pilots or crew, and that analysis of the behaviour of the pilots on CCTV showed "no significant behavioural changes".


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: In 2016, a leaked American document stated that a route on the pilot's home flight simulator, which closely matched the projected flight over the Indian Ocean, was found during the FBI analysis of the flight simulator's computer hard drive. This was later confirmed by the ATSB, although the agency stressed that this did not prove the pilot's involvement. The find was similarly confirmed by the Malaysian government.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: In 2018, the sister of the pilot said that the safety investigation report on MH370 showed "nothing negative" about the pilot flying the plane. According to the report, "There were seven 'manually programmed' waypoint coordinates that, when connected together, will create a flight path from KLIA to an area south of the Indian Ocean through the Andaman Sea. But a forensic report concluded there were no unusual activities other than game-related flight simulations." The waypoints were recovered from a backup file dated 3 February 2014 but the report reached no conclusion regarding the dates they had been set.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Flight 370 was carrying of cargo, of which four ULDs of mangosteens (total ) and of lithium-ion batteries were of interest, according to Malaysian investigators. The mangosteens were loaded into the aft cargo bay of the aircraft at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, and inspected by officials from Malaysia's Federal Agriculture Marketing Authority before being loaded onto Flight 370. According to the head of Malaysian police, Khalid Abu Bakar, the people who handled the mangosteens and the Chinese importers were questioned to rule out sabotage.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: The lithium-ion batteries were contained in a consignment being shipped from Motorola Solutions facilities in Bayan Lepas, Malaysia, to Tianjin, China; the rest of the consignment consisted of walkie-talkie chargers and accessories. The batteries were assembled on 7 March and the consignment was transported to the Penang Cargo Complex—operated by MASkargo (Malaysia Airlines' cargo subsidiary)—where it was loaded onto a lorry for transfer to Kuala Lumpur International Airport and onwards by air to Beijing. At the Penang Cargo Complex, the consignment was inspected by MASkargo employees and Malaysian customs officials, but did not go through a security screening before the lorry was sealed for transfer to the airport. The consignment did not go through any additional inspections at Kuala Lumpur International Airport before being loaded onto Flight 370; it was divided among two pallets in the forward cargo bay of the aircraft and one pallet placed in the rear of the aft cargo bay. The batteries were packaged in accordance with IATA guidelines, so they were not regulated as dangerous goods.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Lithium-ion batteries can cause intense fires if they overheat and ignite, which has led to strict regulations on their transport aboard aircraft. A fire fuelled by lithium-ion batteries caused the crash of UPS Airlines Flight 6, and lithium-ion batteries are suspected to have caused a fire which resulted in the crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 991; both were cargo aircraft. Some airlines have stopped carrying bulk shipments of lithium-ion batteries on passenger aircraft, citing safety concerns.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Public communication from Malaysian officials regarding the loss of Flight 370 was initially beset with confusion. The Malaysian government and the airline released imprecise, incomplete, and occasionally inaccurate information, with civilian officials sometimes contradicting military leaders. Malaysian officials were criticised for such persistent release of contradictory information, most notably regarding the last location and time of contact with the aircraft.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Malaysia's acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, who was also the country's Defence Minister (until May 2018), denied the existence of problems between the participating countries, but academics explained that because of regional conflicts, there were genuine trust issues involved in co-operation and sharing intelligence, and that these were hampering the search. International relations experts suggested that entrenched rivalries over sovereignty, security, intelligence, and national interests made meaningful multilateral co-operation very difficult. A Chinese academic made the observation that the parties were searching independently, and it was therefore not a multilateral search effort. "The Guardian" newspaper noted the Vietnamese permission given for Chinese aircraft to overfly its airspace as a positive sign of co-operation. Vietnam temporarily scaled back its search operations after the country's Deputy Transport Minister cited a lack of communication from Malaysian officials despite requests for more information. China, through the official Xinhua News Agency, urged the Malaysian government to take charge and conduct the operation with greater transparency, a point echoed by the Chinese Foreign Ministry days later.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Malaysia had initially declined to release raw data from its military radar, deeming the information "too sensitive", but later acceded. Defence experts suggested that giving others access to radar information could be sensitive on a military level, for example: "The rate at which they can take the picture can also reveal how good the radar system is." One suggested that some countries could already have had radar data on the aircraft, but were reluctant to share any information that could potentially reveal their defence capabilities and compromise their own security. Similarly, submarines patrolling the South China Sea might have information in the event of a water impact, and sharing such information could reveal their locations and listening capabilities.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Criticism was also levelled at the delay of the search efforts. On 11 March 2014, three days after the aircraft disappeared, British satellite company Inmarsat (or its partner, SITA) had provided officials with data suggesting that the aircraft was nowhere near the areas in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea being searched at the time, and that it may have diverted its course through a southern or northern corridor. This information was not acknowledged publicly until it was released by the Malaysian Prime Minister in a press conference on 15 March. Explaining why information about satellite signals had not been made available earlier, Malaysia Airlines stated that the raw satellite signals needed to be verified and analysed "so that their significance could be properly understood" before it could publicly confirm their existence. Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin claimed that Malaysian and US investigators had immediately discussed the Inmarsat data upon receipt on 12 March, and that they had agreed to send the data to the US for further processing on two separate occasions. Data analysis was completed on 14 March, by which time the AAIB had independently arrived at the same conclusion.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: In June 2014, relatives of passengers on Flight 370 began a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to raise US$100,000—with an ultimate goal of raising US$5 million—as a reward to encourage anyone with knowledge of the location of Flight 370, or the cause of its disappearance, to reveal what they knew. The campaign, which ended on 8 August 2014, raised US$100,516 from 1007 contributors.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: A month after the disappearance, Malaysia Airlines' chief executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya acknowledged that ticket sales had declined but failed to provide specific details. This may have partially resulted from the suspension of the airline's advertising campaigns following the disappearance. Ahmad stated in an interview with "The Wall Street Journal" that the airline's "primary focus...is that we do take care of the families in terms of their emotional needs and also their financial needs. It is important that we provide answers for them. It is important that the world has answers, as well." In further remarks, Ahmad said he was not sure when the airline could start repairing its image, but that the airline was adequately insured to cover the financial loss stemming from Flight 370's disappearance. In China, where the majority of passengers were from, bookings on Malaysia Airlines were down 60% in March.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Malaysia Airlines retired the MH370 flight number and replaced it with MH318 (Flight 318) beginning 14 March 2014. This follows a common practice among airlines to redesignate flights after notorious accidents. Flight 318—Malaysia Airline's second scheduled daily service to Beijing—was suspended seven weeks later, on 2 May; according to insiders, this was due to lack of demand.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Malaysia Airlines was given US$110 million from insurers in March 2014 to cover initial payments to passengers' families and the search effort. In May, remarks from lead reinsurer of the flight, Allianz, indicated the insured market loss on Flight 370, including the search, was about US$350 million.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: At the time of Flight 370's disappearance, Malaysia Airlines was struggling to cut costs to compete with a wave of new, low-cost carriers in the region. In the previous three years, Malaysia Airlines had booked losses of: RM1.17 billion (US$356 million) in 2013, RM433 million in 2012, and RM2.5 billion in 2011. Malaysia Airlines lost RM443.4 million (US$137.4 million) in the first quarter of 2014 (January–March). The second quarter—the first full quarter in the aftermath of Flight 370's disappearance—saw a loss of RM307.04 million (US$97.6 million), representing a 75% increase over losses from the second quarter of 2013. Industry analysts expected Malaysia Airlines to lose further market share and face a challenging environment to stand out from competitors while addressing its financial plight. The company's stock, down as much as 20% following the disappearance of Flight 370, had fallen 80% over the previous five years, in contrast to a rise in the Malaysian stock market of about 80% over the same period.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Many analysts and the media suggested that Malaysia Airlines would need to rebrand and repair its image and/or require government assistance to return to profitability. The loss of Flight 17 in July greatly exacerbated Malaysia Airline's financial problems. The combined effect on consumer confidence of the loss of Flight 370 and Flight 17, and the airline's poor financial performance, led Khazanah Nasional—the majority shareholder (69.37%) and a Malaysian state-run investment arm—to announce on 8 August its plan to purchase the remainder of the airline, thereby renationalising it. Malaysia Airlines on 1 September 2015.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Lack of evidence in determining the cause of Flight 370's disappearance, as well as the absence of any physical confirmation that the airplane crashed, raises many issues regarding responsibility for the accident and the payments made by insurance agencies. Under the Montreal Convention, it is the carrier's responsibility to prove lack of fault in an accident and each passenger's next of kin are automatically entitled, regardless of fault, to a payment of approximately US$175,000 from the airline's insurance company—amounting to a total of almost US$40 million for the 227 passengers on board.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Malaysia Airlines was also vulnerable to civil action from passengers' families. Compensation awarded during civil cases (or settlements reached out of court) was likely to vary widely among passengers, based on the country where the proceedings were to take place. An American court could be expected to award upwards of US$8–10 million, while Chinese courts would be likely to award a small fraction of that amount. Despite the announcement that the flight ended in the southern Indian Ocean, it was not until 29 January 2015 that the Malaysian government officially declared Flight 370 an accident with no survivors, a move that would allow compensation claims to be made. The first civil case relating to the disappearance was filed in October 2014—even before Flight 370 had been declared an accident—on behalf of two Malaysian boys whose father was a passenger; they were claiming for negligence in failing to contact the aircraft soon after it was lost and for breach of contract for failing to bring the passenger to his destination. Additional civil proceedings against Malaysia Airlines were filed in China and Malaysia.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Soon after the disappearance of Flight 370, Malaysia Airlines offered "ex gratia" condolence payments to families of the passengers. In China, the families were offered ¥31,000 (approx. US$5,000) "comfort money", but some rejected the offer. It was also reported that Malaysian relatives received only $2,000. In June 2014, Malaysia's deputy Foreign Minister Hamzah Zainuddin said that families of seven passengers received $50,000 advance compensation from Malaysia Airlines, but that full payout would come after the aircraft was found, or officially declared lost (which later occurred in January 2015).


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Air force experts raised questions and the Malaysian opposition levelled criticisms about the state of Malaysia's air force and radar capabilities. Many criticised the failure of the Royal Malaysian Air Force to identify and respond to an unidentified aircraft (later determined to be Flight 370) flying through Malaysian airspace. The Malaysian military became aware of the unidentified aircraft only after reviewing radar recordings several hours after the flight's disappearance. The failure to recognise and react to the unidentified aircraft was a security breach, and was also a missed opportunity to intercept Flight 370 and prevent the time-consuming and expensive search operation.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: The Malaysian Prime Minister, Najib Razak, responded to criticism of his government in an opinion piece published in "The Wall Street Journal" in which he acknowledged mistakes had been made, and said time would show that Malaysia had done its best, had helped co-ordinate the search, and would continue to provide support. Najib went on to emphasise the need for the aviation industry to "not only learn the lessons of MH370 but implement them," saying in closing that "the world learned from Air France Flight 447 but didn't act. The same mistake must not be made again."


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim criticised the Malaysian government regarding its response to Flight 370's disappearance and the military's response when Flight 370 turned back over the Malay Peninsula; he called for an international committee to take charge of the investigation "to save the image of the country and to save the country." Malaysian authorities have accused Anwar—who was jailed on contentious charges the day before Flight 370 disappeared—of politicising the crisis. Flight 370's captain was a supporter of Anwar and the two men were acquainted.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Questioned about why Malaysia did not scramble fighter jets to intercept the aircraft as it tracked back across the Malay Peninsula, acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin noted that it was deemed a commercial aircraft and was not hostile, remarking: "If you're not going to shoot it down, what's the point of sending [a fighter jet] up?" According to former air force pilot major Ahmad Zaidi of RMAF Butterworth, no pilot stays on the base during the night, so the aircraft could not have been intercepted.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: The response to the crisis and lack of transparency in the response brought attention to the state of media in Malaysia. After decades of tight media control, during which government officials were accustomed to passing over issues without scrutiny or accountability, Malaysia was suddenly thrust into the spotlight of the global media and unable to adjust to demands for transparency.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: On 8 March 2020, six years after the disappearance, two memorial events were held to mark the anniversary. Families of MH370 passengers called for a new search for the flight in a bid to seek closure. Malaysia's former Transport Minister Anthony Loke had attended one of the events, expressing regret at being unable to table the compensation documents at the Cabinet level as per his original intent. The families hoped that the new Transport Minister Wee Ka Siong could expedite the compensation matters.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Malaysia's transport ministry secretary-general, Datuk Isham Ishak, stated that he had already submitted a request to meet the Prime Minister (Muhyiddin Yassin) the following week of 15 to 22 March so that he could present the paper on compensation for the families of MH370 victims, and that the ministry would also continue to seek support from the new government to resume the search for the missing aircraft.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Xie Hangsheng reacted sceptically to the conclusion by the Malaysian government that the aircraft had gone down with no survivors, demanding on 24 March 2014 "all the relevant information and evidence about the satellite data analysis", and said that the Malaysian government must "finish all the work including search and rescue." The following day, Chinese president Xi Jinping sent a special envoy to Kuala Lumpur to consult with the Malaysian government over the missing aircraft.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: In the days following the disappearance of Flight 370, relatives of those on board became increasingly frustrated at the lack of news. On 25 March 2014, around two hundred family members of the Chinese passengers protested outside the Malaysian embassy in Beijing. Relatives who had arrived in Kuala Lumpur after the announcement continued with their protest, accusing Malaysia of hiding the truth and harbouring a murderer. They also wanted an apology from the Malaysian government for its poor initial handling of the disaster and its "premature" conclusion of total loss, drawn without any physical evidence. An op-ed in state media outlet "China Daily" said that Malaysia was not wholly to be blamed for its poor handling of such a "bizarre" and "unprecedented crisis," and appealed to the Chinese relatives not to allow emotions to prevail over evidence and rationality. The Chinese ambassador to Malaysia defended the Malaysian government's response, stating that the "radical and irresponsible opinions [of the relatives] do not represent the views of Chinese people and the Chinese government". The ambassador also strongly criticised Western media for having "published false news, stoked conflict and even spread rumours" to the detriment of relatives and of Sino–Malaysian relations. On the other hand, a US Department of Defense official criticised China for what he perceived as providing apparently false leads that detracted from the search effort and wasted time and resources.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: In July 2019, Beijing-based family members of some MH370 victims received notice from Malaysia Airlines that from July 2019 onwards, MAS would discontinue the "Meet the Families" discussion sessions in Beijing, China. This came after around 50 sessions had taken place.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Some Chinese citizens boycotted all things Malaysian, including holidays and singers, in protest of Malaysia's handling of the Flight 370 investigation. Bookings on Malaysia Airlines from China, where the majority of passengers were from, were down 60% in March. In late March, several major Chinese ticketing agencies—eLong, LY.com, Qunar, and Mango—discontinued the sale of airline tickets to Malaysia and several large Chinese travel agencies reported a 50% drop in tourists compared to the same period the year before. China was the third-largest source of visitors to Malaysia prior to Flight 370's disappearance, accounting for 1.79 million tourists in 2013. One market analyst predicted a 20–40% drop in Chinese tourists to Malaysia, resulting in a loss of 4–8 billion yuan (RM2.1–4.2 billion; US$0.65–1.3 billion).


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: The boycotts were largely led or supported by celebrities. Film star Chen Kun posted a message to Weibo—where he had 70 million followers—stating that he would be boycotting Malaysia until its government told the truth. The post was shared over 70,000 times and drew over 30,000 comments. More than 337,000 people retweeted a tweet from TV host Meng Fei, that said he would join the boycott.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: China and Malaysia had previously nominated 2014 to be the "Malaysia–China Friendship Year" to celebrate 40 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: The fact that a modern aircraft could disappear in a digitally connected world was met with surprise and disbelief by the public. While changes in the aviation industry often take years to be implemented, airlines and air transport authorities responded swiftly to take action on several measures to reduce the likelihood of a similar incident.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: The International Air Transport Association (IATA)—an industry trade organisation representing more than 240 airlines (accounting for 84% of global air traffic)—and the ICAO began working on implementing new measures to track aircraft in flight in real time. The IATA created a task force (which included several outside stakeholders) to define a minimal set of requirements that any tracking system must meet, allowing airlines to decide the best solution to track their aircraft. The IATA's task force planned to come up with several short-, medium-, and long-term solutions to ensure that information is provided in a timely manner to support search, rescue, and recovery activities in the wake of an aircraft accident. The task force was expected to provide a report to the ICAO on 30 September 2014, but announced on that date that the report would be delayed, citing the need for further clarification on some issues. In December 2014, the IATA task force recommended that, within 12 months, airlines track commercial aircraft in no longer than 15-minute intervals. The IATA itself did not support the deadline, which it believed could not be met by all airlines, but the proposed standard had the support of the ICAO. Although the ICAO can set standards, it has no legal authority and such standards must be adopted by member states.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: In 2016, the ICAO adopted a standard that, by November 2018, all aircraft over open ocean report their position every 15 minutes. In March, the ICAO approved an amendment to the Chicago Convention requiring new aircraft manufactured after 1 January 2021 to have autonomous tracking devices which could send location information at least once per minute in distress circumstances.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: In May 2014, Inmarsat said that it would offer its tracking service for free to all aircraft equipped with an Inmarsat satellite connection (which includes the vast majority of commercial airliners). Inmarsat also changed the time period for handshakes with its terminals from one hour to 15 minutes.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: There was a call for automated transponders after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001; no changes were made because aviation experts preferred flexible control, in case of malfunctions or electrical emergencies. In the aftermath of Flight 370's disappearance, the air transport industry was still resistant to the installation of automated transponders, which would likely entail significant costs. Pilots also criticised changes of this kind, insisting on the need to cut power to equipment in the event of a fire. Nonetheless, new types of tamper-proof circuit breakers were being considered.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: The intensive and urgent search for the flight recorders in early April 2014, due to the 30-day battery life of the underwater locator beacons (ULBs) (or "pingers") attached to them, drew attention to their inherent limitations. The maximum distance from the ULBs at which the signal can be detected is normally , or under favourable conditions. Even if the flight recorders are located, the cockpit voice recorder memory has the capacity to store only two hours of data, continuously recording over the oldest data. This storage capacity complies with regulations, which take account of the fact that it is usually only the data recordings from the last section of a flight that are needed to determine the cause of an accident. However, the events that led to Flight 370 diverting from its course, before disappearing, took place more than two hours before the flight ended. Given these shortcomings, and the importance of the data stored on flight recorders, Flight 370 has brought to attention new technologies that enable data streaming to the ground.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: A call to increase the battery life of ULBs was made following the unsuccessful initial search in 2009 for the flight recorders on Air France Flight 447, which were not located until 2011. A formal recommendation that the ULB design be upgraded to offer a longer battery life, or to make the recorders ejectable, had been included in the final report of the board of inquiry into the loss of South African Airways Flight 295 over the Indian Ocean in 1987, but it was not until 2014 that the ICAO made such a recommendation, with implementation required by 2018. The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) issued new regulations that require the transmitting time of ULBs fitted to aircraft flight recorders to be increased from 30 to 90 days, to be implemented by 1 January 2020. The agency has also proposed that a new underwater locator beacon with a greater range of transmission should be fitted to aircraft that fly over oceans. In June 2015, Dukane, a manufacturer of underwater locator beacons, began selling beacons with a 90-day battery life.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: In March 2016, the ICAO adopted several amendments to the Chicago Convention in order to address issues raised by the disappearance of Flight 370. These affected aircraft manufactured after 2020, requiring cockpit voice recorders to record at least 25 hours of data, to ensure that all phases of a flight are recorded. Aircraft designs approved after 2020 must incorporate a means of recovering the flight recorders, or the information contained on them, before the recorders sink below the water. This provision is performance-based so that it can be accomplished by different techniques, such as streaming flight recorder data from a stricken aircraft, or using flight recorders that eject from the aircraft and float on the surface of the water. The new regulations do not require modifications to be made to existing aircraft.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: In January 2015, the US National Transportation Safety Board cited Flight 370 and Air France Flight 447 when it issued eight safety recommendations related to locating aircraft wreckage in remote or underwater locations; and repeated recommendations for a crash-protected cockpit image recorder and tamper-resistant flight recorders and transponders.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been described as "one of the biggest mysteries in modern aviation history".


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Several documentaries have been produced about the flight. The Smithsonian Channel aired a one-hour documentary on 6 April 2014, titled "Malaysia 370: The Plane That Vanished", and the Discovery Channel broadcast a one-hour documentary about Flight 370 on 16 April 2014, titled "Flight 370: The Missing Links".


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: On 17 June 2014, an episode of the television documentary series "Horizon", titled "Where Is Flight MH370?" was broadcast on BBC Two. The programme, narrated by Amanda Drew, documents how the aircraft disappeared, what experts believe to have happened to it, and how the search has unfolded. It also examines new technologies, such as flight recorder streaming and automatic dependent surveillance – broadcast (ADS-B), which may help prevent similar disappearances in the future. The programme concludes by noting that "Ocean Shield" had spent two months searching of ocean, but that it had searched far to the north of the Inmarsat "hotspot" on the final arc, at approximately 28 degrees south, where the aircraft was most likely to have crashed. On 8 October 2014, a modified version of the "Horizon" programme was broadcast in the US by PBS as an episode of "NOVA", titled "Why Planes Vanish", with a different narrator.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: The aviation disaster documentary television series "Mayday" (also known as "Air Crash Investigation" and "Air Emergency") produced an episode on the disaster, titled "What Happened to Malaysian 370?" The episode aired in the UK on 8 March 2015, the first anniversary of Flight 370's disappearance. In August 2018, the television series "Drain the Oceans", which airs on the National Geographic channel, highlighted the disaster, the methods used in the search, and the potential discoveries.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Panoply is making a podcast story loosely based on the disappearance of MH370, called "Passenger List", featuring the voice of Kelly Marie Tran as the lead character.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: Jeff Rake, creator of the NBC show "Manifest", said that after he had pitched his idea for the show without any success, the MH370 disappearance led to the TV network's sudden interest.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: The podcast "Stuff You Should Know" released a two-part episode discussing the case, titled "The Disappearance of Flight MH370", on 7 and 9 January 2020. "Black Box Down", a podcast detailing aviation accidents, also had an episode covering the incident released on 18 June 2020.


title: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

text: The first work of fiction about the incident was "MH370: A Novella", by New Zealand author Scott Maka.


title: Romani people

text: The Romani (also spelled Romany or Rromani , ), colloquially known as the Roma, are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group, traditionally nomadic itinerants. They live in Europe and Anatolia, and have diaspora populations located worldwide, with significant concentrations in the Americas.


title: Romani people

text: In the English language, the Romani people are widely known by the exonym Gypsies (or Gipsies), which is considered pejorative by many Romani people due to its connotations of illegality and irregularity as well as its historical use as a racial slur. For versions (some of which are cognates) of the word in many other languages (e.g., , , , , and ) this perception is either very small or non-existent. At the first World Romani Congress in 1971, its attendees unanimously voted to reject the use of all exonyms for the Romani people, including "Gypsy", due to their aforementioned negative and stereotypical connotations.


title: Romani people

text: Linguistic and genetic evidence suggests that the Roma originated in the Indian subcontinent; in particular, the region of Rajasthan. They are dispersed, but their most concentrated populations are located in Europe, especially Central, Eastern and Southern Europe (including Southern France), as well as Western Asia (mainly Turkey). The Romani people arrived in West Asia and Europe around the 14th century.


title: Romani people

text: Since the 19th century, some Romani people have also migrated to the Americas. There are an estimated one million Roma in the United States and 800,000 in Brazil, most of whose ancestors emigrated in the 19th century from Eastern Europe. Brazil also includes a notable Romani community descended from people deported by the Portuguese Empire during the Portuguese Inquisition. In migrations since the late 19th century, Romani people have also moved to other countries in South America and to Canada. Though often confused with them, the Romani people are culturally different from Irish Travellers and the Yenish people, two groups who may be related to each other.


title: Romani people

text: Romani is an Indo-Aryan language with strong Balkan and Greek influence. It is divided into several dialects, which together are estimated to have more than two million speakers. Because it has traditionally been an oral language, many Romani people are native speakers of the dominant language in their country of residence or of mixed languages combining the dominant language with a dialect of Romani; those varieties are sometimes called Para-Romani.


title: Romani people

text: The Romani began to leave India about 1,000 years ago. They probably left to escape the invasion of Afghan general Mahmud of Ghazni early in the 11th century. Mahmud's troops likely pushed the Romani out of northern India and into the area that is now Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran.


title: Romani people

text: For a variety of reasons, many Romanis choose not to register their ethnic identity in official censuses. There are an estimated 10 million Romani people in Europe (as of 2019), although some Romani organizations give estimates as high as 14 million. Significant Romani populations are found in the Balkans, in some Central European states, in Spain, France, Russia and Ukraine. In the European Union, there are an estimated 6 million Romanis. Several million more Romanis may live outside Europe, in particular in the Middle East and in the Americas.


title: Romani people

text: There is no single Romani "homeland". A home country for the Romani people has been proposed, under the name Romanistan.


title: Romani people

text: Like the Roma in general, many different ethnonyms are given to subgroups of Roma. Sometimes a subgroup uses more than one endonym, is commonly known by an exonym or erroneously by the endonym of another subgroup. The only name approaching an all-encompassing self-description is "Rom". Even when subgroups do not use the name, they all acknowledge a common origin and a dichotomy between themselves and "Gadjo" (non-Roma). For instance, while the main group of Roma in German-speaking countries refer to themselves as Sinti, their name for their original language is "Romanes".


title: Romani people

text: Subgroups have been described as, in part, a result of the castes and subcastes in India, which the founding population of "Rom" almost certainly experienced in their South Asian "urheimat".


title: Romani people

text: Many groups use names apparently derived from the Romani word "kalo" or "calo", meaning "black" or "absorbing all light". This closely resembles words for "black" or "dark" in Indo-Aryan languages (e.g. Sanskrit काल "kāla": "black", "of a dark colour"). Likewise, the name of the Dom or Domba people of North India – to whom the Roma have genetic, cultural and linguistic links – has come to imply "dark-skinned", in some Indian languages. Hence names such as "kale" and "calé" may have originated as an exonym or a euphemism for Roma.


title: Romani people

text: The Roma people have a number of distinct populations, the largest being the Roma who reached Anatolia and the Balkans about the early 12th century from a migration out of northwestern India beginning about 600 years earlier. They settled in the areas that are now Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Hungary, Slovakia and Spain, by order of volume. From the Balkans, they migrated throughout Europe and Iberian Calé or Caló, and, in the nineteenth and later centuries, to the Americas. The Romani population in the United States is estimated at more than one million. Brazil has the second largest Romani population in the Americas, estimated at 800,000 by the 2011 census.


title: Romani people

text: The Romani people are mainly called "ciganos" by non-Romani ethnic Brazilians. Most of them belong to the ethnic subgroup "Calés" (Kale), of the Iberian peninsula. Juscelino Kubitschek, Brazilian president during 1956–1961 term, was 50% Czech Romani by his mother's bloodline, and Washington Luís, last president of the First Brazilian Republic (1926–1930 term), had Portuguese Kale ancestry.


title: Romani people

text: Unfortunately, the persecution against the gypsy people has led to the fact that many of the cultural practices have been extinguished, hidden or modified in order to survive in a country that has excluded them ethnically and culturally.


title: Romani people

text: The very common Carnivals throughout the entire Brazilian territory are one of the few spaces in which the Romani people can still express their cultural traditions, being a moment in which they can practice their traditional dances and rituals, actively participating in the fairs. with the reading of the tarot, celebrating traditional symbolic acts such as gypsy weddings and in other less common cases they have adapted to the carioca carnivalesque culture contributing their own nuances, as is the case of the so-called "carnival wedding" in which a child of The male sex is disguised as a bride and a gypsy wedding or the famous "Romaní Dance" is picturesquely simulated, where the women of the town parade during carnival acts dancing in their traditional gypsy attire.


title: Romani people

text: There is no official or reliable count of the Romani populations worldwide. Many Romani refuse to register their ethnic identity in official censuses for fear of discrimination. Others are descendants of intermarriage with local populations, some who no longer identify only as Romani and some who don't identify as Romani at all.


title: Romani people

text: As of the early 2000s, an estimated 3.8 to 9 million Romani people lived in Europe and Asia Minor, although some Romani organizations estimate numbers as high as 14 million. Significant Romani populations are found in the Balkan peninsula, in some Central European states, in Spain, France, Russia, and Ukraine. The total number of Romani living outside Europe are primarily in the Middle East and North Africa and in the Americas and are estimated in total at more than two million. Some countries do not collect data by ethnicity.


title: Romani people

text: The Romani people identify as distinct ethnicities based in part on territorial, cultural and dialectal differences, and self-designation.


title: Romani people

text: Genetic findings suggest an Indian origin for Roma. Because Romani groups did not keep chronicles of their history or have oral accounts of it, most hypotheses about the Romani migration's early history are based on linguistic theory. There is also no known record of a migration from India to Europe from medieval times that can be connected indisputably to Roma.


title: Romani people

text: According to a legend reported in the Persian epic poem, the "Shahnameh", from Iran and repeated by several modern authors, the Sasanian king Bahrām V Gōr learned towards the end of his reign (421–439) that the poor could not afford to enjoy music, and he asked the king of India to send him ten thousand "luris", lute-playing experts. When the luris arrived, Bahrām gave each one an ox, a donkey, and a donkey-load of wheat so that they could live on agriculture and play music for free for the poor. However, the luris ate the oxen and the wheat and came back a year later with their cheeks hollowed with hunger. The king, angered with their having wasted what he had given them, ordered them to pack up their bags and go wandering around the world on their donkeys.


title: Romani people

text: The linguistic evidence has indisputably shown that the roots of the Romani language lie in India: the language has grammatical characteristics of Indian languages and shares with them a large part of the basic lexicon, for example, regarding body parts or daily routines.


title: Romani people

text: Romani and Domari share some similarities: agglutination of postpositions of the second layer (or case marking clitics) to the nominal stem, concord markers for the past tense, the neutralisation of gender marking in the plural, and the use of the oblique case as an accusative. This has prompted much discussion about the relationships between these two languages. Domari was once thought to be a "sister language" of Romani, the two languages having split after the departure from the Indian subcontinent but later research suggests that the differences between them are significant enough to treat them as two separate languages within the Central zone (Hindustani) group of languages. The Dom and the Rom therefore likely descend from two migration waves out of India, separated by several centuries.


title: Romani people

text: In phonology, the Romani language shares several isoglosses with the Central branch of Indo-Aryan languages, especially in the realization of some sounds of the Old Indo-Aryan. However, it also preserves several dental clusters. In regards to verb morphology, Romani follows exactly the same pattern of northwestern languages such as Kashmiri and Shina through the adoption of oblique enclitic pronouns as person markers, lending credence to the theory of their Central Indian origin and a subsequent migration to northwestern India. Though the retention of dental clusters suggests a break from central languages during the transition from Old to Middle Indo-Aryan, the overall morphology suggests that the language participated in some of the significant developments leading toward the emergence of New Indo-Aryan languages.


title: Romani people

text: Genetic findings in 2012 suggest the Romani originated in northwestern India and migrated as a group. According to the study, the ancestors of present scheduled castes and scheduled tribes populations of northern India, traditionally referred to collectively as the Ḍoma, are the likely ancestral populations of modern European Roma.


title: Romani people

text: In December 2012, additional findings appeared to confirm the "Roma came from a single group that left northwestern India about 1,500 years ago". They reached the Balkans about 900 years ago and then spread throughout Europe. The team also found the Roma to display genetic isolation, as well as "differential gene flow in time and space with non-Romani Europeans".


title: Romani people

text: Genetic research published in "European Journal of Human Genetics" "has revealed that over 70% of males belong to a single lineage that appears unique to the Roma".


title: Romani people

text: Genetic evidence supports the medieval migration from India. The Romani have been described as "a conglomerate of genetically isolated founder populations", while a number of common Mendelian disorders among Romanies from all over Europe indicates "a common origin and founder effect". A 2020 whole-genome study confirmed the Northwest Indian origins, and also confirmed substantial Balkan and Middle Eastern ancestry.


title: Romani people

text: A study from 2001 by Gresham et al. suggests "a limited number of related founders, compatible with a small group of migrants splitting from a distinct caste or tribal group". The same study found that "a single lineage... found across Romani populations, accounts for almost one-third of Romani males". A 2004 study by Morar et al. concluded that the Romani population "was founded approximately 32–40 generations ago, with secondary and tertiary founder events occurring approximately 16–25 generations ago".


title: Romani people

text: Haplogroup H-M82 is a major lineage cluster in the Balkan Romani group, accounting for approximately 60% of the total. Haplogroup H is uncommon in Europe but present in the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka.


title: Romani people

text: A study of 444 people representing three ethnic groups in North Macedonia found mtDNA haplogroups M5a1 and H7a1a were dominant in Romanies (13.7% and 10.3%, respectively).


title: Romani people

text: Y-DNA composition of Muslim Romani people from Šuto Orizari Municipality in North Macedonia, based on 57 samples:


title: Romani people

text: Y-DNA Haplogroup H1a occurs in Romani at frequencies 7–70%. Unlike ethnic Hungarians, among Hungarian and Slovakian Romani subpopulations, Haplogroup E-M78 and I1 usually occur above 10% and sometimes over 20%. While among Slovakian and Tiszavasvari Romani the dominant haplogroup is H1a, among Tokaj Romani is Haplogroup J2a (23%), while among Taktaharkány Romani is Haplogroup I2a (21%). Five, rather consistent founder lineages throughout the subpopulations, were found among Romani – J-M67 and J-M92 (J2), H-M52 (H1a1), and I-P259 (I1). Haplogroup I-P259 as H is not found at frequencies of over 3 percent among host populations, while haplogroups E and I are absent in South Asia. The lineages E-V13, I-P37 (I2a) and R-M17 (R1a) may represent gene flow from the host populations. Bulgarian, Romanian and Greek Romani are dominated by Haplogroup H-M82 (H1a1), while among Spanish Romani J2 is prevalent. In Serbia among Kosovo and Belgrade Romani Haplogroup H prevails, while among Vojvodina Romani, H drops to 7 percent and E-V13 rises to a prevailing level.


title: Romani people

text: Among non-Roma Europeans Haplogroup H is extremely rare, peaking at 7 percent among Albanians from Tirana and 11 percent among Bulgarian Turks. It occurs at 5 percent among Hungarians, although the carriers might be of Romani origin. Among non Roma-speaking Europeans at 2 percent among Slovaks, 2 percent among Croats, 1 percent among Macedonians from Skopje, 3 percent among Macedonian Albanians, 1 percent among Serbs from Belgrade, 3 percent among Bulgarians from Sofia, 1 percent among Austrians and Swiss, 3 percent among Romanians from Ploiești, 1 percent among Turks.


title: Romani people

text: The Ottoman occupation of the Balkans also left a significant genetic mark on the Y-DNA of Romani people; creating a higher frequency of the haplogroups J and E3b in Roma populations from the region.


title: Romani people

text: A full genome autosomal DNA study on 186 Roma samples from Europe in 2019 found that modern Roma people are characterized by a complex admixture of West Eurasian lineages, mostly a composition of South Asian and various local European (mostly Balkan-derived) ancestries. The autosomal genetic data links the proto-Roma to groups in Northwest India (specifically Punjabi and Gujarati samples), although their paternal lineages are more common in Southern India among Dravidian-speaking populations. The authors argue that this may point to a founder effect among early Romani people during their ethnogenesis or shortly after they migrated out of the Indian subcontinent. Subsequently, after arriving in Europe, they partially mixed with local European groups in the Balkans.


title: Romani people

text: The Romani may have emerged from what is the modern Indian state of Rajasthan, migrating to the northwest (the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent) around 250 BCE. Their subsequent westward migration, possibly in waves, is now believed to have occurred beginning in about 500 CE.


title: Romani people

text: It has also been suggested that emigration from India may have taken place in the context of the raids by Mahmud of Ghazni. As these soldiers were defeated, they were moved west with their families into the Byzantine Empire. The author Ralph Lilley Turner theorised a central Indian origin of Romani followed by a migration to Northwest India as it shares a number of ancient isoglosses with Central Indo-Aryan languages in relation to realization of some sounds of Old Indo-Aryan. This is lent further credence by its sharing exactly the same pattern of northwestern languages such as Kashmiri and Shina through the adoption of oblique enclitic pronouns as person markers. The overall morphology suggests that Romani participated in some of the significant developments leading toward the emergence of New Indo-Aryan languages, thus indicating that the proto-Romani did not leave the Indian subcontinent until late in the second half of the first millennium.


title: Romani people

text: In February 2016, during the International Roma Conference, then Indian Minister of External Affairs, Sushma Swaraj stated that the people of the Roma community were children of India. The conference ended with a recommendation to the government of India to recognize the Roma community spread across 30 countries as a part of the Indian diaspora.


title: Romani people

text: Rom means husband in the Romani language. It has the variants "dom" and "lom", which may be related to the Sanskrit words "dam-pati" (lord of the house, husband), "dama" (to subdue), "lom" (hair), "lomaka" (hairy), "loman", "roman" (hairy), "romaça" (man with beard and long hair). Another possible origin is from Sanskrit डोम "doma" (member of a low caste of travelling musicians and dancers). Despite their presence in the country and neighboring nations, the word is not related in any way to the name of Romania.


title: Romani people

text: In the Romani language, "Rom" is a masculine noun, meaning 'husband of the Roma ethnic group', with the plural "Roma". The feminine of "Rom" in the Romani language is "Romni /Romli/Romnije or Romlije". However, in most cases, in other languages "Rom" is now used for individuals regardless of gender.


title: Romani people

text: "Romani" is the feminine adjective, while "Romano" is the masculine adjective. Some Romanies use "Rom" or "Roma" as an ethnic name, while others (such as the Sinti, or the Romanichal) do not use this term as a self-ascription for the entire ethnic group.


title: Romani people

text: Sometimes, "rom" and "romani" are spelled with a double "r", i.e., "rrom" and "rromani". In this case "rr" is used to represent the phoneme (also written as "ř" and "rh"), which in some Romani dialects has remained different from the one written with a single "r". The "rr" spelling is common in certain institutions (such as the INALCO Institute in Paris), or used in certain countries, e.g., Romania, to distinguish from the endonym/homonym for Romanians ("sg. român, pl. români").


title: Romani people

text: In Norway, "Romani" is used exclusively for an older Northern Romani-speaking population (which arrived in the 16th century) while "Rom/Romanes" is used to describe Vlax Romani-speaking groups which have arrived since the 19th century.


title: Romani people

text: In the English language (according to the Oxford English Dictionary), "Rom" is a noun (with the plural "Roma" or "Roms") and an adjective, while "Romani" ("Romany") is also a noun (with the plural "Romani", "the Romani", "Romanies", or "Romanis") and an adjective. Both "Rom" and "Romani" have been in use in English since the 19th century as an alternative for Gypsy. "Romani" was sometimes spelled "Rommany", but more often "Romany", while today "Romani" is the most popular spelling. Occasionally, the double "r" spelling (e.g., "Rroma", "Rromani") mentioned above is also encountered in English texts.


title: Romani people

text: Because not all Romani people use the word "Romani" as an adjective, the term became a noun for the entire ethnic group. Today, the term "Romani" is used by some organizations, including the United Nations and the US Library of Congress. However, the Council of Europe and other organizations consider that "Roma" is the correct term referring to all related groups, regardless of their country of origin, and recommend that "Romani" be restricted to the language and culture: Romani language, Romani culture. The United Kingdom government uses the term "Roma" as a sub-group of "White" in its ethnic classification system.


title: Romani people

text: The standard assumption is that the demonyms of the Romani people, Lom and Dom, share the same origin.


title: Romani people

text: The English term "Gypsy" (or "Gipsy") originates from the Middle English "gypcian", short for "Egipcien". The Spanish term "Gitano" and French "Gitan" have similar etymologies. They are ultimately derived from the Greek ("Aigyptioi"), meaning Egyptian, via Latin. This designation owes its existence to the belief, common in the Middle Ages, that the Romani, or some related group (such as the Middle Eastern Dom people), were itinerant Egyptians. This belief appears to be derived from verses in the Biblical Book of Ezekiel (29: 6 and 12–13) which refer to the Egyptians being scattered among the nations by an angry God. According to one narrative, they were exiled from Egypt as punishment for allegedly harbouring the infant Jesus. In his book "The Zincali: an account of the Gypsies of Spain", George Borrow notes that when they first appeared in Germany, it was under the character of Egyptians doing penance for their having refused hospitality to Mary and her son. As described in Victor Hugo's novel "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", the medieval French referred to the Romanies as "Egyptiens".


title: Romani people

text: This exonym is sometimes written with capital letter, to show that it designates an ethnic group. However, the word is sometimes considered derogatory because of its negative and stereotypical associations. The Council of Europe consider that "Gypsy" or equivalent terms, as well as administrative terms such as "Gens du Voyage" are not in line with European recommendations. In Britain, many Romani proudly identify as "Gypsies". In North America, the word "Gypsy" is most commonly used as a reference to Romani ethnicity, though lifestyle and fashion are at times also referenced by using this word.


title: Romani people

text: Another common designation of the Romani people, which can be considered derogatory, is "Cingane" (alt. Çingene, Tsinganoi, Zigar, Zigeuner, Tschingaren), likely deriving from the Persian word (), derived from the Turkic word , meaning poor person. It is also possible that the origin of this word is "Athinganoi", the name of a Christian sect with whom the Romani (or some related group) could have become associated with in the past.


title: Romani people

text: According to a 2012 genomic study, the Romani reached the Balkans as early as the 12th century. A document of 1068, describing an event in Constantinople, mentions "Atsingani", probably referring to Romani.


title: Romani people

text: Later historical records of the Romani reaching south-eastern Europe are from the 14th century: in 1322, after leaving Ireland on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Irish Franciscan friar Symon Semeonis encountered a migrant group of Romani outside the town of Candia (modern Heraklion), in Crete, calling them "the descendants of Cain"; his account is the earliest surviving description by a Western chronicler of the Romani in Europe.


title: Romani people

text: In 1350, Ludolph of Saxony mentioned a similar people with a unique language whom he called "Mandapolos", a word possibly derived from the Greek word "mantes" (meaning prophet or fortune teller).


title: Romani people

text: In the 14th century, Romani are recorded in Venetian territories, including Methoni and Nafplio in the Peloponnese, and Corfu. Around 1360, a fiefdom called the "Feudum Acinganorum" was established in Corfu, which mainly used Romani serfs and to which the Romani on the island were subservient.


title: Romani people

text: By the 1440s, they were recorded in Germany; and by the 16th century, Scotland and Sweden. Some Romani migrated from Persia through North Africa, reaching the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century. The two currents met in France.


title: Romani people

text: Around the year 1000, an event in northern India, about the time of Muslim invaders, likely triggered the Roma’s mass exodus. The precise event is still unknown, but the possible reasons include a conflict that resulted in their persecution, a natural disaster, or even recruitment into a mercenary military. The Roma people journeyed towards the Caucasus and China, as well as through the Middle East and Greece towards the Balkans; they covered all corners of today's Central and Western Europe by the end of the 16th century. Romanis typically traveled in patriarchal extended families, consisting of up to hundreds of people.


title: Romani people

text: Their early history shows a mixed reception. Although 1385 marks the first recorded transaction for a Romani slave in Wallachia, they were issued safe conduct by Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund in 1417. Romanis were ordered expelled from the Meissen region of Germany in 1416, Lucerne in 1471, Milan in 1493, France in 1504, Catalonia in 1512, Sweden in 1525, England in 1530 (see Egyptians Act 1530), and Denmark in 1536. From 1510 onwards, any Romani found in Switzerland were to be executed; while in England (beginning in 1554) and Denmark (beginning of 1589) any Romani which did not leave within a month were to be executed. Portugal began deportations of Romanis to its colonies in 1538.


title: Romani people

text: A 1596 English statute gave Romanis special privileges that other wanderers lacked. France passed a similar law in 1683. Catherine the Great of Russia declared the Romanis "crown slaves" (a status superior to serfs), but also kept them out of certain parts of the capital. In 1595, Ștefan Răzvan overcame his birth into slavery, and became the Voivode (Prince) of Moldavia.


title: Romani people

text: Since a royal edict by Charles II in 1695, Spanish Romanis had been restricted to certain towns. An official edict in 1717 restricted them to only 75 towns and districts, so that they would not be concentrated in any one region. In the Great Gypsy Round-up, Romani were arrested and imprisoned by the Spanish Monarchy in 1749.


title: Romani people

text: During the latter part of the 17th century, around the Franco-Dutch War, both France and the Dutch Republic needed thousands of men to fight. Some recruitment took the form of rounding up vagrants and the poor to work the galleys and provide the armies' labour force. With this background, Romanis were targets of both the French and the Dutch.


title: Romani people

text: After the wars, and into the first decade of the 18th century, Romanis were slaughtered with impunity throughout Holland. Romanis, called ‘heiden’ by the Dutch, wandered throughout the rural areas of Europe and became the societal pariahs of the age. "Heidenjachten", translated as "heathen hunt" happened throughout Holland in an attempt to eradicate them.


title: Romani people

text: Although some Romani could be kept as slaves in Wallachia and Moldavia until abolition in 1856, the majority traveled as free nomads with their wagons, as alluded to in the spoked wheel symbol in the Romani flag. Elsewhere in Europe, they were subjected to ethnic cleansing, abduction of their children, and forced labour. In England, Romani were sometimes expelled from small communities or hanged; in France, they were branded, and their heads were shaved; in Moravia and Bohemia, the women were marked by their ears being severed. As a result, large groups of the Romani moved to the East, toward Poland, which was more tolerant, and Russia, where the Romani were treated more fairly as long as they paid the annual taxes.


title: Romani people

text: Romani began emigrating to North America in colonial times, with small groups recorded in Virginia and French Louisiana. Larger-scale Roma emigration to the United States began in the 1860s, with Romanichal groups from Great Britain. The most significant number immigrated in the early 20th century, mainly from the Vlax group of Kalderash. Many Romani also settled in South America.


title: Romani people

text: During World War II, the Nazis embarked on a systematic genocide of the Romani, a process known in Romani as the "Porajmos". Romanies were marked for extermination and sentenced to forced labor and imprisonment in concentration camps. They were often killed on sight, especially by the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads) on the Eastern Front. The total number of victims has been variously estimated at between 220,000 and 1,500,000.


title: Romani people

text: The Romani people were also persecuted in Nazi puppet states. In the Independent State of Croatia, the Ustaša killed almost the entire Roma population of 25,000. The concentration camp system of Jasenovac, run by the Ustaša militia and the Croat political police, were responsible for the deaths of between 15,000 and 20,000 Roma.


title: Romani people

text: In Czechoslovakia, they were labeled a "socially degraded stratum", and Romani women were sterilized as part of a state policy to reduce their population. This policy was implemented with large financial incentives, threats of denying future welfare payments, with misinformation, or after administering drugs.


title: Romani people

text: An official inquiry from the Czech Republic, resulting in a report (December 2005), concluded that the Communist authorities had practised an assimilation policy towards Romanis, which "included efforts by social services to control the birth rate in the Romani community. The problem of sexual sterilisation carried out in the Czech Republic, either with improper motivation or illegally, exists," said the Czech Public Defender of Rights, recommending state compensation for women affected between 1973 and 1991. New cases were revealed up until 2004, in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Germany, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland "all have histories of coercive sterilization of minorities and other groups".


title: Romani people

text: The traditional Romanies place a high value on the extended family. Virginity is essential in unmarried women. Both men and women often marry young; there has been controversy in several countries over the Romani practice of child marriage. Romani law establishes that the man's family must pay a bride price to the bride's parents, but only traditional families still follow it.


title: Romani people

text: Once married, the woman joins the husband's family, where her main job is to tend to her husband's and her children's needs and take care of her in-laws. The power structure in the traditional Romani household has at its top the oldest man or grandfather, and men, in general, have more authority than women. Women gain respect and power as they get older. Young wives begin gaining authority once they have children.


title: Romani people

text: Traditionally, as can be seen on paintings and photos, some Roma men wear shoulder-length hair and a mustache, as well as an earring.


title: Romani people

text: Romani social behavior is strictly regulated by Indian social customs ("marime" or "marhime"), still respected by most Roma (and by most older generations of Sinti). This regulation affects many aspects of life and is applied to actions, people and things: parts of the human body are considered impure: the genital organs (because they produce emissions) and the rest of the lower body. Clothes for the lower body, as well as the clothes of menstruating women, are washed separately. Items used for eating are also washed in a different place. Childbirth is considered impure and must occur outside the dwelling place. The mother is deemed to be impure for forty days after giving birth.


title: Romani people

text: Death is considered impure, and affects the whole family of the dead, who remain impure for a period of time. In contrast to the practice of cremating the dead, Romani dead must be buried. Cremation and burial are both known from the time of the Rigveda, and both are widely practiced in Hinduism today (the general tendency is for Hindus to practice cremation, though some communities in modern-day South India tend to bury their dead). Animals that are considered to be having unclean habits are not eaten by the community.


title: Romani people

text: In Romani philosophy, "Romanipen" (also "romanypen", "romanipe", "romanype", "romanimos", "romaimos", "romaniya") is the totality of the Romani spirit, Romani culture, Romani Law, being a Romani, a set of Romani strains.


title: Romani people

text: An ethnic Romani is considered a gadjo in the Romani society if they have no "Romanipen". Sometimes a non-Romani may be considered a Romani if they do have "Romanipen". Usually this is an adopted child. It has been hypothesized that this owes more to a framework of culture than a simple adherence to historically received rules.


title: Romani people

text: Most Romani people are Christian, others Muslim; some retained their ancient faith of Hinduism from their original homeland of India, while others have their own religion and political organization. Theravada Buddhism influenced by the Dalit Buddhist movement have become popular in recent times among Hungarian Roma.


title: Romani people

text: The modern-day Romani people adopted Christianity or Islam depending on the regions through which they had migrated. Muslim Roma are found in Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Egypt, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Iran, forming a very significant proportion of the Romani people. In neighboring countries such as Romania and Greece, most Romani inhabitants follow the practice of Orthodoxy. It is likely that the adherence to differing religions prevented families from engaging in intermarriage.


title: Romani people

text: Blessed Ceferino Giménez Malla is recently considered a patron saint of the Romani people in Roman Catholicism. Saint Sarah, or Sara e Kali, has also been venerated as a patron saint in her shrine at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, France. Since the turn of the 21st century, Sara e Kali is understood to have been Kali, an Indian deity brought from India by the refugee ancestors of the Roma people; as the Roma became Christianized, she was absorbed in a syncretic way and venerated as a saint.


title: Romani people

text: Saint Sarah is now increasingly being considered as "a Romani Goddess, the Protectress of the Roma" and an "indisputable link with Mother India".


title: Romani people

text: For the Roma communities that have resided in the Balkans for numerous centuries, often referred to as "Turkish Gypsies", the following histories apply for religious beliefs:


title: Romani people

text: In Ukraine and Russia, the Roma populations are also Muslim as the families of Balkan migrants continue to live in these locations. Their ancestors settled on the Crimean peninsula during the 17th and 18th centuries, but some migrated to Ukraine, southern Russia and the Povolzhie (along the Volga River). Formally, Islam is the religion that these communities align themselves with and the people are recognized for their staunch preservation of the Romani language and identity.


title: Romani people

text: In Poland and Slovakia, their populations are Roman Catholic, many times adopting and following local, cultural Catholicism as a syncretic system of belief that incorporates distinct Roma beliefs and cultural aspects. For example, many Polish Roma delay their Church wedding due to the belief that sacramental marriage is accompanied by divine ratification, creating a virtually indissoluble union until the couple consummate, after which the sacramental marriage is dissoluble only by the death of a spouse. Therefore, for Polish Roma, once married, one can't ever divorce. Another aspect of Polish Roma's Catholicism is a tradition of pilgrimage to the Jasna Góra Monastery.


title: Romani people

text: Most Eastern European Romanies are Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Muslim. Those in Western Europe and the United States are mostly Roman Catholic or Protestant in southern Spain, many Romanies are Pentecostal, but this is a small minority that has emerged in contemporary times. In Egypt, the Romanies are split into Christian and Muslim populations.


title: Romani people

text: Romani music plays an important role in Central and Eastern European countries such as Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Albania, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania, and the style and performance practices of Romani musicians have influenced European classical composers such as Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms. The "lăutari" who perform at traditional Romanian weddings are virtually all Romani.


title: Romani people

text: Probably the most internationally prominent contemporary performers in the "lăutari" tradition are Taraful Haiducilor. Bulgaria's popular "wedding music", too, is almost exclusively performed by Romani musicians such as Ivo Papasov, a virtuoso clarinetist closely associated with this genre and Bulgarian pop-folk singer Azis.


title: Romani people

text: Many famous classical musicians, such as the Hungarian pianist Georges Cziffra, are Romani, as are many prominent performers of manele. Zdob și Zdub, one of the most prominent rock bands in Moldova, although not Romanies themselves, draw heavily on Romani music, as do Spitalul de Urgență in Romania, Shantel in Germany, Goran Bregović in Serbia, Darko Rundek in Croatia, Beirut and Gogol Bordello in the United States.


title: Romani people

text: Another tradition of Romani music is the genre of the Romani brass band, with such notable practitioners as Boban Marković of Serbia, and the brass "lăutari" groups Fanfare Ciocărlia and Fanfare din Cozmesti of Romania.


title: Romani people

text: The distinctive sound of Romani music has also strongly influenced bolero, jazz, and flamenco (especially "cante jondo") in Spain.


title: Romani people

text: Dances such as the flamenco and bolero of Spain were influences by the Romani. Antonio Cansino blended Romani and Spanish flamenco and is credited with creating modern-day Spanish dance. The Dancing Cansinos popularized flamenco and bolero dancing in the United States. Famous dancer and actress, Rita Hayworth, is the granddaughter of Antonio Cansino.


title: Romani people

text: European-style gypsy jazz ("jazz Manouche" or "Sinti jazz") is still widely practiced among the original creators (the Romanie People); one who acknowledged this artistic debt was guitarist Django Reinhardt. Contemporary artists in this tradition known internationally include Stochelo Rosenberg, Biréli Lagrène, Jimmy Rosenberg, Paulus Schäfer and Tchavolo Schmitt.


title: Romani people

text: The Romani people in Turkey have achieved musical acclaim from national and local audiences. Local performers usually perform for special holidays. Their music is usually performed on instruments such as the darbuka, gırnata and cümbüş.


title: Romani people

text: Romani folktales and legends are known as paramichia. A hero among the Vlach Roma is Mundro Salamon or Wise Solomon. Other Romani groups call this hero O Godjiaver Yanko.


title: Romani people

text: The Roma believe in the mulo or mullo, which means one who is dead. These beings are the Roma's version of the vampire.


title: Romani people

text: The Roma believe that some foods are auspicious, or lucky (baxtalo), such as foods with pungent tastes like garlic, lemon, tomato, peppers, and fermented foods such as sauerkraut, pickles and sour cream. Romani cuisine is similiar to Hungarian cuisine. Hedgehogs are a delicacy among some Roma.


title: Romani people

text: Romani contemporary art emerged at the climax of the process that began in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, when the interpretation of the cultural practice of minorities was enabled by a paradigm shift, commonly referred to in specialist literature as the Cultural turn. The idea of the "cultural turn" was introduced; and this was also the time when the notion of cultural democracy became crystallized in the debates carried on at various public forums. Civil society gained strength, and civil politics appeared, which is a prerequisite for cultural democracy. This shift of attitude in scholarly circles derived from concerns specific not only to ethnicity but also to society, gender and class.


title: Romani people

text: Most Romani speak one of several dialects of the Romani language, an Indo-Aryan language, with roots in Sanskrit. They also often speak the languages of the countries they live in. Typically, they also incorporate loanwords and calques into Romani from the languages of those countries and especially words for terms that the Romani language does not have. Most of the "Ciganos" of Portugal, the Gitanos of Spain, the Romanichal of the UK, and Scandinavian Travellers have lost their knowledge of pure Romani, and speak the mixed languages Caló, Angloromany, and Scandoromani, respectively. Most of the Romani language-speaking communities in these regions consist of later immigrants from eastern or central Europe.


title: Romani people

text: There are no concrete statistics for the number of Romani speakers, both in Europe and globally. However, a conservative estimate is 3.5 million speakers in Europe and a further 500,000 elsewhere, though the actual number may be considerably higher. This makes Romani the second-largest minority language in Europe, behind Catalan.


title: Romani people

text: In regards to the diversity of dialects, Romani works in the same way as most other European languages. Cross-dialect communication is dominated by the following features:


title: Romani people

text: One of the most enduring persecutions against the Romani people was their enslavement. Slavery was widely practiced in medieval Europe, including the territory of present-day Romania from before the founding of the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia in the 13th–14th centuries. Legislation decreed that all the Romani living in these states, as well as any others who immigrated there, were classified as slaves. Slavery was gradually abolished during the 1840s and 1850s.


title: Romani people

text: The exact origins of slavery in the Danubian Principalities are not known. There is some debate over whether the Romani people came to Wallachia and Moldavia as free men or were brought there as slaves. Historian Nicolae Iorga associated the Roma people's arrival with the 1241 Mongol invasion of Europe and he also considered their enslavement a vestige of that era, in which the Romanians took the Roma from the Mongols and preserved their status as slaves so they could use their labor. Other historians believe that the Romani were enslaved while they were being captured during the battles with the Tatars. The practice of enslaving prisoners of war may have also been adopted from the Mongols.


title: Romani people

text: Some Romani may have been slaves of the Mongols or the Tatars or they may have served as auxiliary troops in the Mongol or Tatar armies, but most of them migrated from south of the Danube at the end of the 14th century, some time after the founding of Wallachia. By then, the institution of slavery was already established in Moldavia and it was possibly established in both principalities. After the Roma migrated into the area, slavery became a widespread practice among the majority of the population. The Tatar slaves, smaller in numbers, were eventually merged into the Roma population.


title: Romani people

text: Some branches of the Romani people reached Western Europe in the 15th century, fleeing from the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans as refugees. Although the Romani were refugees from the conflicts in southeastern Europe, they were often suspected of being associated with the Ottoman invasion by certain populations in the West because their physical appearance was exotic. (The Imperial Diet at Landau and Freiburg in 1496–1498 declared that the Romani were spies for the Turks). In Western Europe, such suspicions and discrimination against people who constituted a visible minority resulted in persecution, often violent, with attempts to commit ethnic cleansing until the modern era. In times of social tension, the Romani suffered as scapegoats; for instance, they were accused of bringing the plague during times of epidemics.


title: Romani people

text: On 30 July 1749, Spain conducted "The Great Roundup" of Romani (Gitanos) in its territory. The Spanish Crown ordered a nationwide raid that led to the break-up of families because all able-bodied men were interned in forced labor camps in an attempt to commit ethnic cleansing. The measure was eventually reversed and the Romanis were freed as protests began to erupt in different communities, sedentary Romanis were highly esteemed and protected in rural Spain.


title: Romani people

text: Later in the 19th century, Romani immigration was forbidden on a racial basis in areas outside Europe, mostly in the English-speaking world. In 1880, Argentina prohibited immigration by Roma, as did the United States in 1885.


title: Romani people

text: In the Habsburg monarchy under Maria Theresa (1740–1780), a series of decrees tried to integrate the Romanies in order to get them to permanently settle, removed their rights to horse and wagon ownership (1754) in order to reduce citizen-mobility, renamed them "New Citizens" and obliged Romani boys into military service just as any other citizens were if they had no trade (1761, and Revision 1770), required them to register with the local authorities (1767), and another decree prohibited marriages between Romanies (1773) in order to integrate them into the local population. Her successor Josef II prohibited the wearing of traditional Romani clothing along with the use of the Romani language, both of which were punishable by flogging. During this time, the schools were obliged to register and integrate Romani children; this policy was the first of the modern policies of integration. In Spain, attempts to assimilate the Gitanos were under way as early as 1619, when the Gitanos were forcibly settled, the use of the Romani language was prohibited, Gitano men and women were sent to separate workhouses and their children were sent to orphanages. King Charles III took a more progressive approach to Gitano assimilation, proclaiming that they had the same rights as Spanish citizens and ending the official denigration of them which was based on their race. While he prohibited their nomadic lifestyle, their use of the Calo language, the manufacture and wearing of Romani clothing, their trade in horses and other itinerant trades, he also forbade any form of discrimination against them and he also forbade the guilds from barring them. The use of the word "gitano" was also forbidden in order to further their assimilation, it was replaced with "New Castilian", a designation which was also applied to former Jews and Muslims.


title: Romani people

text: Most historians believe that Charles III's pragmática failed for three main reasons, reasons which were ultimately derived from its implementation outside major cities as well as in marginal areas: The difficulty which the Gitano community faced in changing its nomadic lifestyle, the marginal lifestyle to which the community had been driven by society and the serious difficulties of applying the pragmática in the fields of education and work. One author ascribes its failure to the overall rejection of the integration of the Gitanos by the wider population.


title: Romani people

text: Other policies of forced assimilation were implemented in other countries, one of these countries was Norway, where a law which permitted the state to remove children from their parents and place them in state institutions was passed in 1896. This resulted in some 1,500 Romani children being taken from their parents in the 20th century.


title: Romani people

text: During World War II, the persecution of the Romanies reached a peak during the Romani Holocaust (the Porajmos), the genocide which was perpetrated against them by Nazi Germany. In 1935, the Romani people who lived in Nazi Germany lost their citizenship when it was stripped from them by the Nuremberg laws, after that, they were subjected to violence and imprisonment in concentration camps and later, they were subjected to genocide in extermination camps. During the war, the policy was extended to areas which were occupied by the Nazis, and it was also implemented by their allies, most notably, by the Independent State of Croatia, Romania, and Hungary.


title: Romani people

text: Because no accurate pre-war census figures exist for the Romanis, the actual number of Romani victims who were killed in the Romani Holocaust cannot be assessed. Most estimates of the number of Romani victims who were killed in the Romani Holocaust range from 200,000 to 500,000, but other estimates range from 90,000 to 1.5 million. Lower estimates do not include those Romanis who were killed in all Axis-controlled countries. A detailed study by Sybil Milton, a former senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum contained an estimate of at least 220,000, possibly as many as 500,000. Ian Hancock, Director of the Program of Romani Studies and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin, argues in favour of a higher figure of between 500,000 and 1,500,000.


title: Romani people

text: In Central Europe, the extermination in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was so thorough that the Bohemian Romani language became extinct.


title: Romani people

text: In Europe, Romani people are associated with poverty, blamed for high crime rates, and accused of behaving in ways that are considered antisocial or inappropriate by the rest of the European population. Partly for this reason, discrimination against the Romani people has continued to be practiced to the present day, although efforts are being made to address them.


title: Romani people

text: Amnesty International reports continued to document instances of Antizigan discrimination during the late 20th century, particularly in Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, and Kosovo. The European Union has recognized that discrimination against Romani must be addressed, and with the national Roma integration strategy they encourage member states to work towards greater Romani inclusion and upholding the rights of the Romani in the European Union.


title: Romani people

text: In Eastern Europe, Roma children often attend Roma Special Schools, separate from non-Roma children; these schools tend to offer a lower quality of education than the traditional education options accessible by non-Roma children, putting the Roma children at an educational disadvantage.


title: Romani people

text: The Romanis of Kosovo have been severely persecuted by ethnic Albanians since the end of the Kosovo War, and for the most part, the region's Romani community has been annihilated.


title: Romani people

text: Czechoslovakia carried out a policy of sterilization of Romani women, starting in 1973. The dissidents of the Charter 77 denounced it in 1977–78 as a genocide, but the practice continued through the Velvet Revolution of 1989. A 2005 report by the Czech Republic's independent ombudsman, Otakar Motejl, identified dozens of cases of coercive sterilization between 1979 and 2001, and called for criminal investigations and possible prosecution against several health care workers and administrators.


title: Romani people

text: In 2008, following the rape and subsequent murder of an Italian woman in Rome at the hands of a young man from a local Romani encampment, the Italian government declared that Italy's Romani population represented a national security risk and it also declared that it was required to take swift action in order to address the "emergenza nomadi" ("nomad emergency"). Specifically, officials in the Italian government accused the Romanies of being responsible for rising crime rates in urban areas.


title: Romani people

text: The 2008 deaths of Cristina and Violetta Djeordsevic, two Roma children who drowned while Italian beach-goers remained unperturbed, brought international attention to the relationship between Italians and the Roma people. Reviewing the situation in 2012, one Belgian magazine observed:


title: Romani people

text: The 2016 Pew Research poll found that Italians, in particular, hold strong anti-Roma views, with 82% of Italians expressing negative opinions about Roma. In Greece, 67%, in Hungary 64%, in France 61%, in Spain 49%, in Poland 47%, in the UK 45%, in Sweden 42%, in Germany 40%, and in the Netherlands 37% had an unfavourable view of Roma. The 2019 Pew Research poll found that 83% of Italians, 76% of Slovaks, 72% of Greeks, 68% of Bulgarians, 66% of Czechs, 61% of Lithuanians, 61% of Hungarians, 54% of Ukrainians, 52% of Russians, 51% of Poles, 44% of French, 40% of Spaniards, and 37% of Germans held unfavorable views of Roma. IRES published in 2020 a survey which revealed that 72% of Romanians have a negative opinion about them.


title: Romani people

text: As of 2019, reports of anti-Roma incidents are increasing across Europe. Discrimination against Roma remains widespread in Kosovo, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic. Roma communities across Ukraine have been the target of violent attacks.


title: Romani people

text: Roma refugees fleeing the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine have faced discrimination in Europe, including in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Moldova


title: Romani people

text: Concerning employment, on average, across the European states which were surveyed, 16% of Roma women were in paid work in 2016 compared to a third of men.


title: Romani people

text: In the summer of 2010, French authorities demolished at least 51 illegal Roma camps and began the process of repatriating their residents to their countries of origin. This followed tensions between the French state and Roma communities, which had been heightened after a traveller drove through a French police checkpoint, hit an officer, attempted to hit two more officers, and was then shot and killed by the police. In retaliation a group of Roma, armed with hatchets and iron bars, attacked the police station of Saint-Aignan, toppled traffic lights and road signs and burned three cars. The French government has been accused of perpetrating these actions to pursue its political agenda. EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding stated that the European Commission should take legal action against France over the issue, calling the deportations "a disgrace". A leaked file dated 5 August, sent from the Interior Ministry to regional police chiefs, included the instruction: "Three hundred camps or illegal settlements must be cleared within three months, Roma camps are a priority."


title: Romani people

text: Many depictions of Romani people in literature and art present romanticized narratives of mystical powers of fortune telling or irascible or passionate temper paired with an indomitable love of freedom and a habit of criminality. Romani were a popular subject in Venetian painting from the time of Giorgione at the start of the 16th century; the inclusion of such a figure adds an exotic oriental flavour to scenes. A Venetian Renaissance painting by Paris Bordone (c. 1530, Strasbourg) of the Holy Family in Egypt makes Elizabeth a Romani fortune-teller; the scene is otherwise located in a distinctly European landscape.


title: Romani people

text: Particularly notable are classics like the story "Carmen" by Prosper Mérimée and the opera based on it by Georges Bizet, Victor Hugo's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", Herge's "The Castafiore Emerald" and Miguel de Cervantes' "La Gitanilla". The Romani were also depicted in "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "As You Like It", "Othello" and "The Tempest", all by William Shakespeare.


title: Romani people

text: The Romani were also heavily romanticized in the Soviet Union, a classic example being the 1975 film "Tabor ukhodit v Nebo".


title: Romani people

text: A more realistic depiction of contemporary Romani in the Balkans, featuring Romani lay actors speaking in their native dialects, although still playing with established clichés of a Romani penchant for both magic and crime, was presented by Emir Kusturica in his "Time of the Gypsies" (1988) and "Black Cat, White Cat" (1998). The films of Tony Gatlif, a French director of Romani ethnicity, like "Les Princes" (1983), "Latcho Drom" (1993) and "Gadjo Dilo" (1997) also portray Romani life.


title: Amazon Prime Video

text: Amazon Prime Video, also known simply as Prime Video, is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming and rental service of Amazon offered as a standalone service or as part of Amazon's Prime subscription. The service primarily distributes films and television series produced by Amazon Studios and MGM Holdings or licensed to Amazon, as Amazon Originals, with the service also hosting content from other providers, content add-ons, live sporting events, and video rental and purchasing services.