title: Harry Hopkins

text: Born in Iowa, Hopkins settled in New York City after he graduated from Grinnell College. He accepted a position in New York City's Bureau of Child Welfare and worked for various social work and public health organizations. He was elected president of the National Association of Social Workers in 1923. In 1931, New York Temporary Emergency Relief Administration chairman Jesse I. Straus hired Hopkins as the agency's executive director. His successful leadership of the program earned the attention of then-New York Governor Roosevelt, who brought Hopkins into his federal administration after he won the 1932 presidential election. Hopkins enjoyed close relationships with President Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and was considered a potential successor to the president until the late 1930s, when his health began to decline due to a long-running battle with stomach cancer.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: As Roosevelt's closest confidant, Hopkins assumed a leading foreign policy role after the outset of World War II. From 1940 until 1943, Hopkins lived in the White House and assisted the president in the management of American foreign policy, particularly toward the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. He traveled frequently to the United Kingdom, whose prime minister, Winston Churchill, recalled Hopkins in his memoirs as a "natural leader of men" with "a flaming soul." Hopkins attended the major conferences of the Allied powers, including the Cairo Conference (November 1943), the Tehran Conference (November–December 1943), the Casablanca Conference (January 1943), and the Yalta Conference (February 1945). His health continued to decline, and he died in 1946 at the age of 55.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: Hopkins was born at 512 Tenth Street in Sioux City, Iowa, the fourth child of four sons and one daughter of David Aldona and Anna ("née" Pickett) Hopkins. His father, born in Bangor, Maine, ran a harness shop (after an erratic career as a salesman, prospector, storekeeper, and bowling-alley operator), but his real passion was bowling, and he eventually returned to it as a business. Anna Hopkins, born in Hamilton, Ontario, had moved at an early age to Vermillion, South Dakota, where she married David. She was deeply religious and active in the affairs of the Methodist church. Shortly after Harry was born, the family moved successively to Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Kearney and Hastings, Nebraska. They spent two years in Chicago and finally settled in Grinnell, Iowa.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: Hopkins attended Grinnell College and soon after his graduation in 1912 took a job with Christodora House, a social settlement house in New York City's Lower East Side ghetto. In the spring of 1913, he accepted a position from John A. Kingsbury of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP) as a "friendly visitor" and superintendent of the Employment Bureau within the AICP's Department of Family Welfare. During the 1915 recession, Hopkins and the AICP's William Matthews, with $5,000 from Elizabeth Milbank Anderson's Milbank Memorial Fund, organized the Bronx Park Employment program, which was one of the first public employment programs in the US.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: In 1915, New York City Mayor John Purroy Mitchel appointed Hopkins executive secretary of the Bureau of Child Welfare which administered pensions to mothers with dependent children.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: Hopkins at first opposed America's entrance into World War I, but, when war was declared in 1917, he supported it enthusiastically. He was rejected for the draft because of a bad eye. Hopkins moved to New Orleans where he worked for the American Red Cross as director of Civilian Relief, Gulf Division. Eventually, the Gulf Division of the Red Cross merged with the Southwestern Division and Hopkins, headquartered now in Atlanta, was appointed general manager in 1921. Hopkins helped draft a charter for the American Association of Social Workers (AASW) and was elected its president in 1923.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: In 1922, Hopkins returned to New York City, where the AICP was involved with the Milbank Memorial Fund and the State Charities Aid Association in running three health demonstrations in New York State. Hopkins became manager of the Bellevue-Yorkville health project and assistant director of the AICP. In mid-1924 he became executive director of the New York Tuberculosis Association. During his tenure, the agency grew enormously and absorbed the New York Heart Association.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: In 1931, New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt named R. H. Macy's department store president Jesse Straus as president of the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA). Straus named Hopkins, then unknown to Roosevelt, as TERA's executive director. His efficient administration of the initial $20 million outlay to the agency gained Roosevelt's attention, and in 1932, he promoted Hopkins to the presidency of the agency. Hopkins and Eleanor Roosevelt began a long friendship, which strengthened his role in relief programs.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: In March 1933, Roosevelt summoned Hopkins to Washington as federal relief administrator. Convinced that paid work was psychologically more valuable than cash handouts, Hopkins sought to continue and expand New York State's work relief programs, the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration. He supervised the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Over 90% of the people employed by the Hopkins programs were unemployed or on relief. He feuded with Harold Ickes, who ran a rival program, the Public Works Administration, which also created jobs but did not require applicants to be unemployed or on relief.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: FERA, the largest program from 1933 to 1935, involved giving money to localities to operate work relief projects to employ those on direct relief. CWA was similar but did not require workers to be on relief to receive a government-sponsored job. In less than four months, the CWA hired four million people, and during its five months of operation, the CWA built and repaired 200 swimming pools, 3,700 playgrounds, 40,000 schools, of road, and 12 million feet of sewer pipe.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: The WPA, which followed the CWA, employed 8.5 million people in its seven-year history, working on 1.4 million projects, including the building or repair of 103 golf courses, 1,000 airports, 2,500 hospitals, 2,500 sports stadiums, 3,900 schools, 8,192 parks, 12,800 playgrounds, 124,031 bridges, 125,110 public buildings, and of highways and roads. The WPA operated on its own on selected projects in co-operation with local and state governments, but always with its own staff and budget. Hopkins started programs for youth (National Youth Administration) and for artists and writers (Federal One Programs). Hopkins and Eleanor Roosevelt worked together to publicize and defend New Deal relief programs. He was concerned with rural areas but increasingly focused on cities in the Great Depression.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: Before Hopkins began to decline from his struggle with stomach cancer in the late 1930s, Roosevelt appeared to be training him as a possible successor. With the advent of World War II in Europe, however, Roosevelt ran again in 1940 and won an unprecedented third term.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: On May 10, 1940, after a long night and day spent discussing the German invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg that had ended the so-called "Phoney War," Roosevelt urged a tired Hopkins to stay for dinner and then the night in a second-floor White House bedroom. Hopkins would live out of the bedroom for the next three-and-a-half years.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: On December 7, 1941, at 1:40 pm, Hopkins was in the Oval Study, in the White House, having lunch with President Roosevelt, when Roosevelt received the first report that Pearl Harbor had been attacked via phone from Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. Initially, Hopkins was skeptical of the news until Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Harold Rainsford Stark called a few minutes later to confirm Pearl Harbor had in fact been attacked.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: During the war years, Hopkins acted as Roosevelt's chief emissary to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. In January 1941, Roosevelt dispatched Hopkins to assess Britain's determination and situation. Churchill escorted the important visitor all over the United Kingdom. Before he returned, at a small dinner party in the North British Hotel, Glasgow, Hopkins rose to propose a toast: "I suppose you wish to know what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return. Well I am going to quote to you one verse from the Book of Ruth ... 'Whither thou goest, I will go and where thou lodgest I will lodge, thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.'" Hopkins became the administrator of the Lend-Lease program, under which the United States gave to Britain and Soviet Union, China, and other Allied nations food, oil, and materiel including warships, warplanes and weaponry. Repayment was primarily in the form of Allied military action against the enemy, as well as leases on army and naval bases in Allied territory used by American forces.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: Hopkins had a major voice in policy for the vast $50 billion Lend-Lease program, especially regarding supplies, first for Britain and then, upon the German invasion, the Soviets. He went to Moscow in July 1941 to make personal contact with Joseph Stalin. Hopkins recommended and Roosevelt accepted the inclusion of the Soviets in Lend Lease. Hopkins made Lend Lease decisions in terms of Roosevelt's broad foreign policy goals. He accompanied Churchill to the Atlantic Conference. Hopkins promoted an aggressive war against Germany and successfully urged Roosevelt to use the Navy to protect convoys headed for Britain before the US had entered the war in December 1941. Roosevelt brought him along as advisor to his meetings with Churchill and Stalin at Cairo, Tehran, Casablanca in 1942-43, and Yalta in 1945. He was a firm supporter of China, which received Lend-Lease aid for its military and air force. Hopkins wielded more diplomatic power than the entire State Department. Hopkins helped identify and sponsor numerous potential leaders, including Dwight D. Eisenhower. He continued to live in the White House and saw the President more often than any other advisor.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: In mid-1943, Hopkins faced a barrage of criticism from Republicans and the press that he had abused his position for personal profit. One Representative asserted that British media tycoon Lord Beaverbrook had given Hopkins's wife, Louise, $500,000 worth of emeralds, which Louise denied. Newspapers ran stories detailing sumptuous dinners that Hopkins attended while he was making public calls for sacrifice. Hopkins briefly considered suing the "Chicago Tribune" for libel after a story that compared him to Grigory Rasputin, the famous courtier of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, but he was dissuaded by Roosevelt.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: Although Hopkins's health was steadily declining, Roosevelt sent him on additional trips to Europe in 1945. Hopkins attended the Yalta Conference in February 1945. He tried to resign after Roosevelt died, but President Harry S. Truman sent Hopkins on one more mission to Moscow.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: Hopkins had three sons who served in the armed forces during the war: Robert, David and Stephen. Stephen was killed in action while he was serving in the Marine Corps.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: Hopkins was the top American official assigned to dealing with Soviet officials during World War II. He liaised with Soviet officials from the middle ranks to the very highest, including Stalin. Anastas Mikoyan was Hopkins' counterpart with responsibility for Lend-Lease. He often explained Roosevelt's plans to Stalin and other top Soviet officials to enlist Soviet support for American objectives, an endeavor that met with limited success. A particularly striking example of bad faith was Moscow's refusal to allow American naval experts to see the German experimental U-boat station at Gdynia captured on March 28, 1945 and thus to help the protection of the very convoys that carried Lend-Lease aid. In turn, Hopkins passed on Stalin's stated goals and needs to Roosevelt. As the top American decision maker in Lend-Lease, he gave priority to supplying the Soviet Union, despite repeated objections from Republicans. As Soviet soldiers were bearing the brunt of the war, Hopkins felt that American aid to the Soviets would hasten the war's conclusion.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: Hopkins continued to be a target of attacks even after his death. George Racey Jordan testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee in December 1949 that Hopkins passed nuclear secrets to the Soviets. Historians do not cite Jordan as credible since at the time Jordan claimed to have met with Hopkins in Washington regarding uranium shipments, Hopkins was in intensive care at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. In 1963, the FBI concluded that Jordan "either lied for publicity and profit or was delusional." According to historian Sean McMeekin, in his recent book "Stalin’s War" (2021), “Many US lend-lease records, including the correspondence of Hopkins and Edward Stettinius Jr and the minutes of the Soviet protocol committee, were declassified in the 1970s, long after opinions about Soviet espionage had hardened into dogma. These files are now open, and they confirm the veracity of nearly all of Jordan’s claims, except for his allegation that Hopkins’s actions were illegal”.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: It is likely that any Soviets who spoke to Hopkins would have been routinely required to report the contact to the NKVD, the Soviet national security agency. Eduard Mark (1998) says that some Soviets, such as spymaster Iskhak Akhmerov, thought that Hopkins was pro-Soviet, but others thought that he was not. Verne W. Newton, the author of "FDR and the Holocaust", said that no writer discussing Hopkins has identified any secrets disclosed or any decision in which he distorted American priorities to help communism. As Mark demonstrated, Hopkins was not pro-Soviet in his recommendations to Roosevelt; he was anti-German and pro-American. Any "secrets" disclosed were authorized. Mark says that at the time, any actions were taken specifically to help the American war effort and to prevent the Soviets from making a deal with Hitler.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: It is currently considered likely that Laurence Duggan was the titular agent "19." Hopkins may simply have been naïve in his estimation of Soviet intentions. The historian Robert Conquest wrote that "Hopkins seems just to have accepted an absurdly fallacious stereotype of Soviet motivation, without making any attempt whatever to think, or to study the readily available evidence, or to seek the judgement of the knowledgeable. He conducted policy vis-a-vis Stalin with mere dogmatic confidence in his own (and his circle's) unshakeable sentiments."


title: Harry Hopkins

text: In 1913, Hopkins married Ethel Gross (1886–1976), a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant active in New York City's Progressive movement. They had three sons: David, Robert, and Stephen, (they had lost an infant daughter to whooping cough) and though Gross divorced Hopkins in 1930 shortly before Hopkins became a public figure, the two kept up an intimate correspondence until 1945. In 1931, Hopkins married Barbara Duncan, who died of cancer six years later. They had one daughter, Diana (1932-2020). In 1942, Hopkins married Louise Gill Macy (1906–1963) in the Yellow Oval Room at the White House. Macy was a divorced, gregarious former editor for "Harper's Bazaar". The two continued to live at the White House at Roosevelt's request, though Louise eventually demanded a home of their own. Hopkins ended his long White House stay on December 21, 1943, moving with his wife to a Georgetown townhouse.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: In mid-1939, Hopkins was told that he had stomach cancer, and doctors performed an extensive operation that removed 75% of his stomach. What remained of Hopkins's stomach struggled to digest proteins and fat, and a few months after the operation, doctors stated that he had only four weeks to live. At this point, Roosevelt brought in experts, who transfused Hopkins with blood plasma that halted his deterioration. When the "Phoney War" phase of World War II ended in May 1940, the situation galvanised Hopkins; as Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote, "the curative impact of Hopkins' increasingly crucial role in the war effort was to postpone the sentence of death the doctors had given him for five more years".


title: Harry Hopkins

text: Though his death has been attributed to his stomach cancer, some historians have suggested that it was the cumulative malnutrition related to his post-cancer digestive problems. Another claim is that Hopkins died from liver failure due to hepatitis or cirrhosis, but Robert Sherwood authoritatively reported that Hopkins' postmortem examination showed the cause of death was hemosiderosis due to hepatic iron accumulation from his many blood transfusions and iron supplements.


title: Harry Hopkins

text: Hopkins died in New York City on January 29, 1946, at the age of 55. His body was cremated and his ashes interred in his former college town at the Hazelwood Cemetery in Grinnell, Iowa. There is a house on the Grinnell College campus named after him and his childhood home, with a plaque, is located at Sixth Avenue and Elm Street.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Anti-Romani sentiment (also called antigypsyism, anti-Romanyism, Romaphobia, or Antiziganism) is a form of anti-Indian sentiment which consists of hostility, prejudice, discrimination or racism which is specifically directed at Romani people (Roma, Sinti, Iberian Kale, Welsh Kale, Finnish Kale, Horahane Roma, and Romanichal). Non-Romani itinerant groups in Europe such as the Yenish, Irish and Highland Travellers are often given the name "gypsy" and confused with the Romani people. As a result, sentiments which were originally directed at the Romani people are also directed at other traveler groups and they are often referred to as "antigypsy" sentiments.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: The term "Antigypsyism" is recognized by the European Parliament and the European Commission as well as by a wide cross-section of civil society.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In the Romani language, "Rom" is a masculine noun, meaning 'man of the Roma ethnic group' or 'man, husband', with the plural "Roma". However, in most cases, in other languages "Rom" is currently used as a descriptive term for people of all genders.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In the early 13th-century Byzantine records, the "Atsínganoi" are mentioned as "wizards ... who are inspired satanically and pretend to predict the unknown".


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Enslavement of Roma, mostly taken as prisoners of war, in the Danubian Principalities is first documented in the late 15th century. In these countries extensive legislation was developed that classified Roma into different groups, according to their tasks as slaves.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: By the 16th century, many Romani who lived in Eastern and Central Europe worked as musicians, metal craftsmen, and soldiers. As the Ottoman Empire expanded, it relegated the Romani, who were seen as having "no visible permanent professional affiliation", to the lowest rung of the social ladder.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: The Dacianos formed the mythical group of European wanderers, said to be a caste of the Romani. They purportedly specialised in child-stealing and the manufacture of human freaks. They are also referred to as a criminal society that lasted until the 18th century, maiming children so they could be sold as professional beggars. The Dacianos are cited to have inhabited parts of Spain for several hundred years. The term itself used to be, along with "gitanos", a Spanish name for Roma. They were also identified as the "Comprachicos" or "Comprapequeños" (meaning "boy-buyers") in Victor Hugo's "The Man Who Laughs". Hugo claimed that traces of this group can be found in the penal laws passed by Spanish and English governments. The origin of their name is allegedly linked to the ancient region of Dacia, a former kingdom and posteriorly a Roman province.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In Royal Hungary in the 16th century at the time of the Turkish occupation, the Crown developed strong anti-Romani policies, since these people were considered suspect as possible Turkish spies or as a fifth column. In this atmosphere, they were expelled from many locations and increasingly adopted a nomadic way of life.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: The first anti-Romani legislation was issued in the March of Moravia in 1538, and three years later, Ferdinand I ordered that Romani in his realm be expelled after a series of fires in Prague.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In 1545, the Diet of Augsburg declared that "whosoever kills a Gypsy (Romani), will be guilty of no murder". The subsequent massive killing spree which took place across the empire later prompted the government to step in to "forbid the drowning of Romani women and children".


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In England, the Egyptians Act 1530 passed by the Crown in Parliament banned Romani from entering the country and required those living in the country to leave within 16 days. Failure to do so could result in confiscation of property, imprisonment and deportation. The act was amended with the Egyptians Act 1554, which directed that they abandon their "naughty, idle and ungodly life and company" and adopt a settled lifestyle. For those who failed to adhere to a sedentary existence, the Privy council interpreted the act to permit the execution of non-complying Romani "as a warning to others".


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In 1710, Joseph I, Holy Roman Emperor, issued an edict against the Romani, ordering "that all adult males were to be hanged without trial, whereas women and young males were to be flogged and banished forever." In addition, in the kingdom of Bohemia, Romani men were to have their right ears cut off; in the March of Moravia, the left ear was to be cut off. In other parts of Austria, they would be branded on the back with a branding iron, representing the gallows. These mutilations enabled authorities to identify the individuals as Romani on their second arrest. The edict encouraged local officials to hunt down Romani in their areas by levying a fine of 100 Reichsthaler on those who failed to do so. Anyone who helped Romani was to be punished by doing forced labor for half a year. The result was mass killings of Romani across the Holy Roman empire. In 1721, Charles VI amended the decree to include the execution of adult female Romani, while children were "to be put in hospitals for education".


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: The Great Gypsy Round-up, also known as the "general imprisonment of the gypsies" ("prisión general de gitanos"), was a raid authorized and organized by the Spanish Monarchy in 1749, that led to the arrest of most gypsies (Romani) in the region. Although a majority were released after a few months, many others spent several years imprisoned and subject to forced labor. The raid was approved by the King Ferdinand VI of Spain. .


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In 1774, Maria Theresa of Austria issued an edict forbidding marriages between Romani. When a Romani woman married a non-Romani, she had to produce proof of "industrious household service and familiarity with Catholic tenets", a male Rom "had to prove his ability to support a wife and children", and "Gypsy children over the age of five were to be taken away and brought up in non-Romani families."


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In 2007 the Romanian government established a panel to study the 18th- and 19th-century period of Romani slavery by Princes, local landowners, and monasteries. This officially legalized practice was first documented in the 15th century. Slavery of Romani was outlawed in the Romanian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia in around 1856.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Governments regularly cited petty theft committed by Romani as justification for regulating and persecuting them. In 1899, the ( "Intelligence service for the security police concerning gypsies") was set up in Munich under the direction of , and catalogued data on all Romani individuals throughout the German-speaking lands. It did not officially close down until 1970. The results were published in 1905 in Dillmann's "Zigeuner-Buch", which was used in the following years as justification for the Porajmos. It described the Romani people as a "plague" and a "menace", but almost exclusively characterized "Gypsy crime" as trespassing and the theft of food.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In the United States during Congressional debate in 1866 over the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which would subsequently grant citizenship to all persons born within U.S. territory, an objection raised was that a consequence of enacting the amendment would be to grant citizenship to Roma and other groups perceived by some as undesirable.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Persecution of Romani people reached a peak during World War II in the Porajmos (literally, "the devouring"), a descriptive neologism for the Nazi genocide of Romanis during the Holocaust. The Romani communities in Central and Eastern Europe were less organized than the Jewish communities; and the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads who travelled from village to village massacring the Romani inhabitants where they lived, typically left few to no records of the number of Roma killed in this way. Even though in a few cases significant documentary evidence of mass murder was generated, it is more difficult to assess the actual number of victims. Historians estimate that between 220,000 and 500,000 Romani were killed by the Germans and their collaborators—25% to over 50% of the slightly fewer than 1 million Roma in Europe at the time. More thorough research by Ian Hancock revealed the death toll to be at about 1.5 million.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Nazi racial ideology put Romani, Jewish, Slavic and Black people at the bottom of the racial scale. The German Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jews of citizenship, confiscated property and criminalized sexual relationships and marriage with Aryans. These laws were extended to Romani as Nazi policy towards Roma and Sinti was complicated by pseudo-historic racialist theories, which could be contradictory, namely that the Romani were of Egyptian ancestry. While they considered Romani grossly inferior, they believed the Roma people had some distant "Aryan" roots that had been corrupted. The Romani are actually a distinctly European people of considerable Northwestern Indian descent, or what is literally considered to be Aryan. Similarly to European Jews, specifically the Ashkenazi, the Romani people quickly acquired European genes via enslavement and intermarriage upon their arrival in Europe 1,000 years ago.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Nazi genocide of the Romani was so thorough that it exterminated the majority of Bohemian Romani speakers, eventually leading to the language's extinction in 1970 with the death of its last known speaker, Hana Šebková. In Denmark, Greece and a small number of other countries, resistance by the native population thwarted planned Nazi deportations and extermination of the Romani. In most conquered countries (e.g., the Baltic states), local cooperation with the Nazis expedited the murder of almost all local Romani. In Croatia, the Croatian collaborators of the Ustaše were so vicious only a minor remnant of Croatian Romani (and Jews) survived the killings.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In 1982, West Germany formally recognized that genocide had been committed against the Romani. Before this they had often claimed that, unlike Jews, Roma and Sinti were not targeted for racial reasons, but for "criminal" reasons, invoking antiziganist stereotype. In modern Holocaust scholarship the Porajmos has been increasingly recognized as a genocide committed simultaneously with the Shoah.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: On 12 March 2000, Pope John Paul II issued a formal public apology to, among other groups of people affected by Catholic persecution, the Romani people and begged God for forgiveness. On 2 June 2019, Pope Francis acknowledged during a meeting with members of the Romanian Romani community the Catholic Church's history of promoting "discrimination, segregation and mistreatment" against Romani people throughout the world, apologized, and asked the Romani people for forgiveness.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: A 2011 report issued by Amnesty International states, "systematic discrimination is taking place against up to 10 million Roma across Europe. The organization has documented the failures of governments across the continent to live up to their obligations."


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Antiziganism has continued well into the 2000s, particularly in Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia and Kosovo. In Bulgaria, Professor Ognian Saparev has written articles stating that 'Gypsies' are culturally inclined towards theft and use their minority status to 'blackmail' the majority. European Union officials censured both the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 2007 for forcibly segregating Romani children from regular schools.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg, has been an outspoken critic of antiziganism. In August 2008, Hammarberg noted that "today's rhetoric against the Roma is very similar to the one used by Nazi Germany before World War II. Once more, it is argued that the Roma are a threat to safety and public health. No distinction is made between a few criminals and the overwhelming majority of the Roma population. This is shameful and dangerous".


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: According to the latest Human Rights First Hate Crime Survey, Romanis routinely suffer assaults in city streets and other public places as they travel to and from homes and markets. In a number of serious cases of violence against them, attackers have also sought out whole families in their homes or whole communities in settlements predominantly housing Romanis. The widespread patterns of violence are sometimes directed both at causing immediate harm to Romanis, without distinction between adults, the elderly, and small children and physically eradicating the presence of Romani people in towns and cities in several European countries.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: The practice of placing Romani students in segregated schools or classes remains widespread in countries across Europe. Many Romani children have been channeled into all-Romani schools that offer inferior quality education and are sometimes in poor physical condition or into segregated all-Romani or predominantly Romani classes within mixed schools. Many Romani children are sent to classes for pupils with learning disabilities. They are also sent to so-called "delinquent schools", with a variety of human rights abuses.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Romani in European cities are often accused of crimes such as pickpocketing. In 2009, a documentary by the BBC called "Gypsy Child Thieves" showed Romani children being kidnapped and abused by Romani gangs from Romania. The children were often held locked in sheds during the nights and sent to steal during the days. However, "Chachipe", a charity which works for the human rights of Romani people, has claimed that this programme promoted "popular stereotypes against Roma which contribute to their marginalisation and provide legitimacy to racist attacks against them" and that in suggesting that begging and child exploitation was "intrinsic to the Romany culture", the programme was "highly damaging" for the Romani people. However, the charity accepted that some of the incidents that were detailed in the programme in fact took place.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: The documentary speculated that in Milan, Italy a single Romani child was able to steal as much as €12,000 in a month; and that there were as many as 50 of such abused Romani children operating in the city. The film went on to describe the link between poverty, discrimination, crime and exploitation.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: A United Nations study found that Romani people living in European countries are arrested for robbery much more often than other groups. Amnesty International and Romani rights groups such as the "Union Romani" blame widespread institutionalised racism and persecution. In July 2008, a Business Week feature found the region's Romani population to be a "missed economic opportunity". Hundreds of people from Ostravice, in the Beskydy mountains in the Czech Republic, signed a petition against a plan to move Romani families from Ostrava city to their home town, fearing the Romani as well as claiming their schools would not being able to cope with the influx of Romani children.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In 2009, the UN's anti-racism panel charged that "Gypsies suffer widespread racism in European Union". The EU has launched a program entitled Decade of Roma Inclusion to combat this and other problems.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: On 5 February 1995, Franz Fuchs killed four Romani in Oberwart with a pipe bomb improvised explosive device which was attached to a sign that read "Roma zurück nach Indien" ("Romani back to India"). It was the worst racial terror attack in post-war Austria, and was Fuchs's first fatal attack.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In 2011 in Bulgaria, the widespread anti-Romanyism culminated in anti-Roma protests in response to the murder of Angel Petrov on the orders of Kiril Rashkov, a Roma leader in the village of Katunitsa. In the subsequent trial, the killer, Simeon Yosifov, was sentenced to 17 years in jail. As of May 2012, an appeal was under way.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Protests continued on 1 October in Sofia, with 2000 Bulgarians marching against the Romani and what they viewed to be the "impunity and the corruption" of the political elite in the country.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Volen Siderov, leader of the far-right Ataka party and presidential candidate, spoke to a crowd at the Presidential Palace in Sofia, calling for the death penalty to be reinstated as well as Romani ghettos to be dismantled.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Many of the organized protests were accompanied by ethnic clashes and racist violence against Romani. The protesters shouted racist slogans like "Gypsies into soap" and "Slaughter the Turks!" Many protesters were arrested for public order offenses. The news media labelled the protests as anti-Romani Pogroms.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Furthermore, in 2009, Bulgarian prime minister Boyko Borisov referred to Roma as "bad human material". The vice-president of the Party of European Socialists, Jan Marinus Wiersma claimed that he "has already crossed the invisible line between right-wing populism and extremism".


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In 2019 pogroms against the Roma community in Gabrovo broke out after 3 young Romani were accused of assaulting a local shopkeeper. The following wave of riots saw incidents of violence and arson of two houses where Roma people were living, leading to the majority of the towns Roma community fleeing over night leaving behind their homes to be looted. Roma rights NGO said that gendarmerie were deployed near places where there were Roma houses, but the police had “shown frustration, urging more Gabrovo Roma to spend the next few days with relatives in other municipalities”. Many Roma have never returned as their homes were burned down and their property destroyed.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Roma make up 2–3% of population in the Czech Republic. According to Říčan (1998), Roma make up more than 60% of Czech prisoners and about 20–30% earn their livelihood in illegal ways, such as procuring prostitution, trafficking and other property crimes. Roma are thus more than 20 times overrepresented in Czech prisons than their population share would suggest.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Several Roma walls have been built by local authorities to segregate the Roma minority from the rest of the population. Such practices have been criticised by both human rights organizations and the European Union, who see it as a case of racial segregation. EU Commissioner Guenter Verheugen called instanced of Roma walls being erected in the Czech Republic "a violation of human rights". The Czech government provided local authorities money for social welfare programmes for Romani, but much of the money was used for buying the houses of the non-Roma residents, thus creating a local Roma-only "ghetto".


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: According to 2010 survey, 83% of Czechs consider Roma asocial and 45% of Czechs would like to expel them from the Czech Republic. A 2011 poll, which followed after a number of brutal attacks by Romani perpetrators against majority population victims, revealed that 44% of Czechs are afraid of Roma people. The majority of the Czech people do not want to have Romanis as neighbours (almost 90%, more than any other group) seeing them as thieves and social parasites. In spite of long waiting time for a child adoption, Romani children from orphanages are almost never adopted by Czech couples. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989 the jobs traditionally employing Romanis either disappeared or were taken over by immigrant workers.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In January 2010, Amnesty International launched a report titled "Injustice Renamed: Discrimination in Education of Roma persists in the Czech Republic". According to the BBC, it was Amnesty's view that while cosmetic changes had been introduced by the authorities, little genuine improvement in addressing discrimination against Romani children has occurred over recent years.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In Denmark, there was much controversy when the city of Helsingør decided to put all Romani students in special classes in its public schools. The classes were later abandoned after it was determined that they were discriminatory, and the Romanis were put back in regular classes.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: France has come under criticism for its treatment of Roma. 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. The French government has been accused of perpetrating these actions to pursue its political agenda. In July 2013, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a very controversial far-right politician and founder of the National Front party, had a lawsuit filed against him by the European Roma and Travellers Forum, SOS Racisme and the French Union of Travellers Association after he publicly called France's Roma population "smelly" and "rash-inducing", claiming his comments violated French law on inciting racial hatred.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: After 2005 Germany deported some 50,000 people, mainly Romanis, to Kosovo. They were asylum seekers who fled the country during the Kosovo War. The people were deported after living more than 10 years in Germany. The deportations were highly controversial: many were children and obtained education in Germany, spoke German as their primary language and considered themselves to be Germans. Three victims of the Hanau shootings were Romanis.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: On 23 February 2009, a Romani man and his five-year-old son were shot dead in Tatárszentgyörgy village southeast of Budapest as they were fleeing their burning house which was set alight by a petrol bomb. The dead man's two other children suffered serious burns. Suspects were arrested and were on trial as of 2011.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In 2012, Viktória Mohácsi, 2004–2009 Hungarian Member of European Parliament of Romani ethnicity, asked for asylum in Canada after previously requesting police protection at home from serious threats she was receiving from hate groups.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In 2007 and 2008, following the brutal rape and subsequent murder of a woman in Rome at the hands of a young man from a local Romani encampment, the Italian government started a crackdown on illegal Roma and Sinti campsites in the country.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In May 2008, Romani camps in Naples were attacked and set on fire by local residents. In July 2008, a high court in Italy overthrew the conviction of defendants who had publicly demanded the expulsion of Romanis from Verona in 2001 and reportedly ruled that "it is acceptable to discriminate against Roma on the grounds that they are thieves". One of those freed was Flavio Tosi, Verona's mayor and an official of the anti-immigrant Lega Nord. The decision came during a "nationwide clampdown" on Romanis by Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. The previous week, Berlusconi's interior minister Roberto Maroni had declared that all Romanis in Italy, including children, would be fingerprinted.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In 2011, the development of a National Inclusion Strategy for Rom, Sinti and Caminanti under the supervision of European Commission has defined the presence of Romani camps as an unacceptable condition.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: As already underlined by many international organizations, the prevalent positioning of the RSC communities in the c.d "nomad camps" fuels segregation and hinders every process of social integration / inclusion; but even where other more stable housing modalities have been found, forms of ghettoization and self-segregation are found, which hinder the process of integration / social inclusion.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Roma make up 3.3% of population in Romania. Prejudice against Romanis is common amongst the Romanians, who characterize them as thieves, dirty, and lazy. A 2000 EU report about Romani said that "in Romania... the continued high levels of discrimination are a serious concern...and progress has been limited to programmes aimed at improving access to education". A survey of the Pro Democrația association in Romania revealed that 94% of the questioned persons believe that the Romanian citizenship should be revoked to the ethnic Romani who commit crimes abroad.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In 2009-2010, a media campaign followed by a parliamentarian initiative asked the Romanian Parliament to accept a proposal to change back the official name of country's Roma (adopted in 2000) to "Țigan", the traditional and colloquial Romanian name for Romani, in order to avoid the possible confusion among the international community between the words Roma, which refers to the Romani ethnic minority, and Romania. The Romanian government supported the move on the grounds that many countries in the European Union use a variation of the word "Țigan" to refer to their Roma populations. The Romanian upper house, the Senate, rejected the proposal.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Several anti-Romani riots occurred in recent decades, notable of which being the 1993 Hădăreni riots, in which a mob of Romanians and Hungarians, in response to the killing of a Romanian by a Romani person, burnt down 13 houses belonging to Roma, lynched three Romani people and forced 130 people to flee the village.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In Baia Mare, Mayor Cătălin Cherecheș announced the building of a 3 metre high, 100 metre long concrete wall to divide the buildings in which the Roma community lives from the rest of the city and bring "order and discipline" into the area.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: The manele, their modern music style, was prohibited in some cities of Romania in public transport and taxis, that action being justified by bus and taxi companies as being for passengers' comfort and a neutral ambience, acceptable for all passengers. However, those actions had been characterised by Speranta Radulescu, a professor of ethno-musicology at the Bucharest Conservatory, as "a defect of Romanian society". There were also a few criticisms of Professor Dr. Ioan Bradu Iamandescu's experimental study, which linked the listening of "manele" to an increased level of aggressiveness and low self-control and suggested a correlation between preference for that music style and low cognitive skills.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In a survey commissioned by the Equality Ombudsman in 2002/2003, Roma described the discrimination they experience in their daily lives. 90 percent stated that they perceive Sweden to a certain or high degree as a racist country. The same amount agreed to a certain or high degree to the statement that the country has an attitude view towards Roma. 25 percent neither feel a part of the Swedish population nor feel accepted in the Swedish society. And 60 percent said that they have been called derogatory or discriminatory terms related to their ethnic background at least once in the last two years.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Three Slovakian Romani women have come before the European Court of Human Rights on grounds of having been sterilised without their consent in Slovakian hospitals. The sterilisations were performed by tubal ligation after the women gave birth by Caesarean section. The court awarded two of the women costs and damages while the third case was dismissed because of the woman's death. A report by the Center for Reproductive Rights and the Centre for Civil and Human Rights has compiled more than 100 cases of Roma women in Slovakia who have been sterilised without their informed consent.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Roma are the victims of ethnically driven violence and crime in Slovakia. According to monitoring and reports provided by the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) in 2013, racist violence, evictions, threats, and more subtle forms of discrimination have increased over the past two years in Slovakia. The ERRC considers the situation in Slovakia to be one of the worst in Europe, as of 2013.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Roma people suffer serious discrimination in Slovakia. Roma children are segregated in school and do not receive the level of education as other Slovakian children. Some are sent to schools for children with mild mental disabilities. As a result, their attainment level is far below average. Amnesty International’s report "Unfulfilled promises: Failing to end segregation of Roma pupils in Slovakia" describes the failure of the Slovak authorities to end the discrimination of Roma children on the grounds of their ethnicity in education. According to a 2012 United Nations Development Programme survey, around 43 per cent of Roma in mainstream schools attended ethnically segregated classes.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: When Romani refugees were allowed into Canada in 1997, a protest was staged by 25 people, including neo-Nazis, in front of the motel where the refugees were staying. The protesters held signs that included, "Honk if you hate Gypsies", "Canada is not a Trash Can", and "G.S.T. – Gypsies Suck Tax". (The last is a reference to Canada's unpopular Goods and Services Tax, also known as GST.) The protesters were charged with promoting hatred, and the case, called "R. v. Krymowski", reached the Supreme Court of Canada in 2005.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: On 5 September 2012, prominent Canadian conservative commentator Ezra Levant broadcast a commentary "The Jew vs. the Gypsies" on "J-Source" in which he accused the Romani people of being a group of criminals: "These are gypsies, a culture synonymous with swindlers. The phrase gypsy and cheater have been so interchangeable historically that the word has entered the English language as a verb: he gypped me. Well the gypsies have gypped us. Too many have come here as false refugees. And they come here to gyp us again and rob us blind as they have done in Europe for centuries.… They’re gypsies. And one of the central characteristics of that culture is that their chief economy is theft and begging."


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: From the end of the Kosovo War in June 1999, about 80% of Kosovo's Romanis were expelled, amounting to approximately 100,000 expellees. For the 1999–2006 period, the European Roma Rights Centre documented numerous crimes perpetrated by Kosovo's ethnic Albanians with the purpose to purge the region of its Romani population along with other non-Albanian ethnic communities. These crimes included murder, abduction and illegal detention, torture, rape, arson, confiscation of houses and other property and forced labour. Whole Romani settlements were burned to the ground by Albanians. Romanis remaining in Kosovo are reported to be systematically denied fundamental human rights. They "live in a state of pervasive fear" and are routinely intimidated, verbally harassed and periodically attacked on racist grounds by Albanians. The Romani community of Kosovo is regarded to be, for the most part, annihilated.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: At UN internally displaced persons' camps in Kosovska Mitrovica for Romanis, the refugees were exposed to lead poisoning.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In Norway, Romani, in common with other marginalised groups, were sterilised by the state, a practice which continued until 1977. In the period 1934-1977 a total of 125 sterilisations were performed on Romanis in Norway, accounting for 0.00288% of the total number of documented sterilisations.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Anti-Romanyism in Norway flared up in July 2012, when roughly 200 Romani people settled outside in Oslo and were later relocated to a building site at Årvoll, in northern Oslo. The group was subjected to hate crimes in the form of stone throwing and fireworks being aimed at and fired into their camp. They, and Norwegians trying to assist them in their situation, also received death threats. Siv Jensen, the leader of the right-wing Progress Party, also advocated the expulsion of the Romani people resident in Oslo.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: A Swiss right-wing magazine, Weltwoche, published a photograph of a gun-wielding Roma child on its cover in 2012, with the title "The Roma are coming: Plundering in Switzerland". They claimed in a series of articles of a growing trend in the country of "criminal tourism for which eastern European Roma clans are responsible", with professional gangs specializing in burglary, thefts, organized begging and street prostitution. The magazine immediately came under criticism for its links to the right-wing populist People's Party (SVP), as being deliberately provocative and encouraged racist stereotyping by linking ethnic origin and criminality. Switzerland's Federal Commission against Racism is considering legal action after complaints in Switzerland, Austria and Germany that the cover breached antiracism laws.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: The Berlin newspaper "Tagesspiegel" investigated the origins of the photograph taken in the slums of Gjakova, Kosovo, where Roma communities were displaced during the Kosovo War to hovels built on a toxic landfill. The Italian photographer, Livio Mancini, denounced the abuse of his photograph, which was originally taken to demonstrate the plight of Roma families in Europe.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: "The Great Replacement" manifesto by Christchurch mosques shooter Brenton Harrison Tarrant described Roma/Travellers as one of the non-Europeans alongside African, Indian, Turkish, and Semitic (Jewish and Arab) peoples that the shooter wanted to be removed from Europe.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: According to the LGBT rights organisation and charity "Stonewall", anti-Romanyism exists in the UK, with a distinction made between Romani people and Irish Travellers (both of whom are commonly known by the exonym "gypsies" in the UK), and the so-called "travellers [and] modern Gypsies". In 2008, the British media reported that Roma & Travellers experience a higher degree of discrimination than any other ethnic group in the UK, including asylum-seekers. A Mori poll showed that a third of respondents admitted to being prejudiced against Roma & Travellers.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Thousands of retrospective planning permissions are granted in Britain in cases involving non-Romani applicants each year, and statistics showed that 90% of planning applications by Romanis and Irish Travellers are initially refused by local councils compared with a national average of 20% for other applicants.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Some travellers have argued that the root of the problem was that many traditional stopping places had been barricaded off and that legislation passed by the previous Conservative governments had effectively criminalised their community. For example, some travellers have claimed that removing local authorities' responsibility to provide sites for travellers leaves them with no option but to purchase unregistered new sites themselves.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In August 2012, the Slovakian television network "TV JOJ" ran a story about instances of Romani immigrant families from Slovakia or the Czech Republic, whose children were forcibly taken away by government social workers. One Romani mother alleged that three social workers, accompanied by six police officers "broke into" their apartment, handcuffed her husband and took their three children away. These accounts sparked a protest by Romani emigrants in front of courthouses where such cases are decided, while government officials refused to comment on the allegations. According to protestors, Romani parents take good care of their children and live "orderly lives". One of the relatives of a mother who made such allegations stated that "they (the parents) are good people". Another mother alleged that she was allowed visitation with her newborn child only in an empty room; as there was no furniture, she was forced to change her baby's nappies on the floor. She claimed that this led social workers to write in their assessments of her that she was "abusing the child". The mother also claimed that if she refused to change her nappies this would lead to the same conclusion as well. In September 2012, the Slovakian government announced their intention to hold talks with British social workers over the decision to remove two Slovakian-born children from their parents and put them up for adoption. Several Slovak media outlets raised concerns over the ruling, which was described by the "Wall Street Journal" as "a thorny issue" between the British and Slovak governments. A crowd of 200 Slovakians protested in front of the British Embassy in Bratislava. The Slovak government threatened to take the British government to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) over the issue, reportedly being "disturbed" by allegations from Slovakian-born parents in the UK. The Slovak Ministry of Justice posted a declaration on their website highly critical of the actions taken by the British government and stated that if further rulings against Slovakian parents continue, they were prepared to submit an appeal to the ECHR over the issue. MP John Hemming spearheaded efforts in the UK, in cooperation with the Slovak ambassador, to oppose the ruling and reunite the children with their families.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In 2002 Conservative Party politician, and MP for Bracknell Andrew MacKay stated in a House of Commons debate on unauthorised encampments of Roma and other Travelling groups in the UK, "They [Roma and Travellers] are scum, and I use the word advisedly. People who do what these people have done do not deserve the same human rights as my decent constituents going about their ordinary lives".


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In 2005, Doncaster Borough Council discussed in chamber a Review of "Gypsy and Traveller Needs" and concluded that "Gypsies" and Irish Travellers are among the most vulnerable and marginalised ethnic minority groups in Britain.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: A Roma and Traveller support centre in Leeds, West Yorkshire, was vandalised in April 2011 in what the police suspect was a hate crime. The fire caused substantial damage to a centre that is used as a base for the support and education of Roma and travellers in the community.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: The Equal Opportunities Committee of the Scottish parliament in 2001 and in 2009 confirmed that widespread marginalisation and discrimination persists in Scottish society against Roma and traveller groups. A 2009 survey conducted by the Scottish Government also concludes that Scottish Roma and travellers had been largely ignored in official policies. A similar survey in 2006 found discriminatory attitudes in Scotland towards Roma and travellers, and showed 37 percent of those questioned would be unhappy if a relative married a Roma person or traveller while 48 percent found it unacceptable if a member of the Roma or traveller minorities became primary school teachers.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: A report by the University of the West of Scotland found that both Scottish and UK governments had failed to safeguard the rights of the Roma as a recognized ethnic group and did not raise awareness of Roma rights within the UK. Additionally, an Amnesty International report published in 2012 stated that Traveller groups in Scotland routinely suffer widespread discrimination in society, as well as a disproportionate level of scrutiny in the media. Over a four-month period as a sample 48 per cent of articles showed Roma & Travellers in a negative light, while 25–28 per cent of articles were favourable, or of a neutral viewpoint. Amnesty recommended journalists adhere to ethical codes of conduct when reporting on Roma & Traveller populations in Scotland, as they face fundamental human rights concerns, particularly with regard to health, education, housing, family life and culture.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: To tackle the widespread prejudices and needs of Roma/Traveller minorities, in 2011, the Scottish Government set up a working party to consider how best to improve community relations between Roma/Travellers and Scottish society. Including young Roma/Travellers to engage in an on-line positive messages campaign, contain factually correct information on their communities.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In 2007, a study by the newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission found that negative attitudes and prejudice persist against Roma/Traveller communities in Wales. Results showed that 38 percent of those questioned would not accept a long-term relationship with, or would be unhappy if a close relative married or formed a relationship with, a Roma or other Traveller. Furthermore, only 37 percent found it acceptable if a member of the Roma or other Traveller minorities became primary school teachers, the lowest score of any group. An advertising campaign to tackle prejudice in Wales was launched by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) in 2008.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In June 2009, having had their windows broken and deaths threats made against them, twenty Romanian Romani families were forced from their homes in Lisburn Road, Belfast, in Northern Ireland. Up to 115 people, including women and children, were forced to seek refuge in a local church hall after being attacked. They were later moved by the authorities to a safer location. An anti-racist rally in the city on 15 June to support Romani rights was attacked by youths chanting neo-Nazi slogans. The attacks were condemned by Amnesty International and political leaders from both the Unionist and Nationalist traditions in Northern Ireland.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Following the arrest of three local youths in relation to the attacks, the church where the Romanis had been given shelter was badly vandalised. Using 'emergency funds', Northern Ireland authorities assisted most of the victims to return to Romania.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: In Chicago in 1911, the highly-publicised disappearance of the five-year old Elsie Paroubek was immediately blamed on "Gypsy child kidnappers". The public was alerted to reports that "Gypsies were seen with a little girl" and many such reports came in. Police raided a "Gypsy" encampment near 18th and South Halstead in Chicago itself and they later expanded the searches and raids to encampments throughout the state of Illinois, to locations as widespread as Round Lake, McHenry, Volo and Cherry Valley - but they found no trace of the missing girl. The police attributed her capture to "the natural love of the wandering people for blue-eyed, yellow-haired children". Lillian Wulff, age 11 - who had actually been kidnapped by some Romanis four years earlier - came forward to offer his assistance, leading the police to conduct further fruitless raids, as well as convincing them to detain the supposed "King of the Gypsies", Elijah George - who, however,"failed to give them the desired information", and was released. Elijah George was detained in Argyle, Wisconsin, and this served to spread the anti-Romani hysteria outside Illinois.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: At the present time, because the Roma population in the United States has quickly assimilated and Roma people are not often portrayed in US popular culture, the term "Gypsy" is typically associated with a trade or lifestyle instead of being associated with the Romani ethnic group. Additionally, some small businesses, particularly those in the fortune-telling and psychic reading industry, use the term "Gypsy" to describe themselves or their enterprises, even though they have no ties to the Roma people.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: While some scholars argue that appropriation of the Roma identity in the United States is based on misconceptions and ignorance rather than anti-Romanyism, Romani advocacy groups decry the practice.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Environmental issues which were caused by Cold War-era industrial development have disproportionately impacted the Roma, particularly those Roma who live in Eastern Europe. Most often, the traditional nomadic lifestyle of the Roma causes them to settle on the outskirts of towns and cities, where amenities, employment and educational opportunities are often inaccessible. As of 1993, Hungary has been identified as one country where this issue exists: "While the economic restructuring of a command economy into a western style market economy created hardships for most Hungarians, with the national unemployment rate heading toward 14 percent and per capita real income falling, the burdens which are imposed on Romanis are disproportionately great."


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: Panel buildings (panelák) in the Chanov ghetto near Most, Czech Republic were built in the 1970s for a high-income clientele, the authorities introduced a model plan, whereby Roma were relocated to these buildings, from poorer areas, to live among Czech neighbors. However, with the rising proportion of Roma moving in, the Czech clients gradually moved out in a kind of white flight, eventually leaving a district in which the vast majority of residents were Roma. A poll in 2007 marked the district as the worst place in the Ústí nad Labem Region. Buildings were eventually stripped of any valuable materials and torn down. The removal of materials was blamed on the Roma who had last inhabited the building. Despite a total rental debt in excess of €3.5 million, all of the tenants in the remaining buildings continue to be provided with water and electricity, unlike the situation in many other European countries.


title: Anti-Romani sentiment

text: The various legal hindrances to their traditional nomadic lifestyle have forced many travelling Roma to move into unsafe areas, such as ex-industrial areas, former landfills or other waste areas where pollutants have affected rivers, streams or groundwater. Consequently, Roma are often unable to access clean water or sanitation facilities, rendering the Roma people more vulnerable to health problems, such as diseases. Based in Belgium, the Health & Environment Alliance has included a statement with regard to the Roma on one of its pamphlets: "Denied environmental benefits such as water, sewage treatment facilities, sanitation and access to natural resources, and suffer from exposure to environmental hazards due to their proximity to hazardous waste sites, incinerators, factories, and other sources of pollution." Since the fall of communism and the privatisation of the formerly state owned water-supply companies in many areas of central and eastern Europe, the provision of decent running water to illegal buildings which are often occupied by Roma became a particularly sensitive issue, because the new international owners of the water-supply companies are unwilling to make contracts with the Roma population and as a result, "water-borne diseases, such as diarrhoea and dysentery" became "an almost constant feature of daily life, especially for children".


title: Stefano Gabbana

text: Stefano Gabbana (; born 14 November 1962) is a fashion designer and, along with Domenico Dolce, the co-founder of the Dolce & Gabbana luxury fashion house.


title: Stefano Gabbana

text: Gabbana was born in Milan to a father who worked in a printing factory and a mother who worked for a laundry service. His family is from Veneto: his mother was born in Ceggia and his father in Cessalto. He graduated from the Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche, a design institute in Rome.


title: Stefano Gabbana

text: In 1980, Gabbana met Sicilian Domenico Dolce through Dolce's employer, designer Giorgio Correggiari. Correggiari, who died in 2012, was extremely influential on the pair, Gabbana said in 2013: "He was not very famous. But for us he was important. He taught us especially what 'not' to do."


title: Stefano Gabbana

text: In 1983, Gabbana and Dolce left Correggiari to work on their own; two years later, they launched Dolce & Gabbana S.p.A. (D&G).


title: Stefano Gabbana

text: In October 1985, the Dolce & Gabbana brand made its fashion show debut at Milano Collezioni's Nuovi Talenti (New Talents). In March 1986, D&G released its first collection and held its own show, "Real Women." In 1987, the first D&G store opened in Milan, at 7 Via Santa Cecilia. In 1988, D&G established a partnership with Dolce's father, Saverio, who owned the manufacturing company Dolce Saverio in Legnano, near Milan.


title: Stefano Gabbana

text: D&G continued to expand, holding its first fashion shows in Tokyo (April 1989) and New York (April 1990), and releasing new collection lines, including its first lingerie and beachwear line in July 1989, and its first menswear line in January 1990. In November 1990, D&G opened its New York City showroom at 532 Broadway in SoHo, Manhattan. D&G released its first fragrance, Dolce & Gabbana Parfum, in October 1992.


title: Stefano Gabbana

text: In 1993, the Italian designers received worldwide fame when Madonna chose D&G to design the costumes for her Girlie Show World Tour. They have since gone on to design for Monica Bellucci, Kylie Minogue, Angelina Jolie and Isabella Rossellini.


title: Stefano Gabbana

text: Later additions to the D&G line included ties, belts, handbags, sunglasses, watches and footwear. By 2003, the company sold more products in Italy than Armani, Gucci, Prada, and Versace. In 2009, nearly 25 years after D&G opened, the company had 113 stores and 21 factory outlets, a staff of 3,500 people and an annual turnover of more than €1 billion.


title: Stefano Gabbana

text: Gabbana and Dolce were an open couple for many years. Following their success, they lived in a 19th-century villa in Milan, and owned several properties on the French Riviera. They ended their long-time relationship in 2003, but the pair still work together at D&G.


title: Stefano Gabbana

text: As of March 2015, Gabbana was the 28th richest person in Italy with a net worth of approximately US$1.56 billion, according to "Forbes".


title: Stefano Gabbana

text: In 2013, both Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce were convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to a 20-month suspended sentence in prison. An Italian court found the pair guilty of failing to declare millions of euros of revenue earned through a D&G subsidiary company, Gado, based in Luxembourg. They denied the charges and appealed the case; in October 2014 they were both cleared of wrongdoing by the appellate court.


title: Stefano Gabbana

text: In March 2015, singer-songwriter Elton John called for a boycott of the D&G brand after Dolce referred to babies born through in vitro fertilization as "chemistry children and synthetic children" in an interview. This sparked a war of words, with Gabbana later calling John a "fascist" and calling for a counter-boycott. However, he later clarified that his views on IVF were separate from that of Dolce. When asked on CNN whether he supported IVF, he responded: "Yeah, I don't have anything bad (to say), because the beauty of the world is freedom" and "We love gay couple. We are gay. We love gay couple. We love gay adoption. We love everything. It's just an express of my private point of view."


title: Stefano Gabbana

text: On 21 November 2018, Gabbana was publicly exposed on Instagram for making racist comments regarding China, including "China ignorant dirty smelling mafia" and calling China "a country of shit". The Shanghai D&G Great Show 2018 was cancelled because of the commercials and his comments. Dolce & Gabbana said the account was hacked and it loved China and its culture.


title: Stefano Gabbana

text: Gabbana and Dolce have received numerous honours for their fashion and cultural contributions. Their first fashion award, the International Woolmark Prize, came in 1991. In 1993, their Dolce & Gabbana Parfum was named the Best Fragrance of the Year.


title: Stefano Gabbana

text: In 2009, the City of Milan awarded them the Ambrogino Gold medal; in 2014, they announced intentions to return it after a city council member called them tax evaders.


title: Stefano Gabbana

text: In 2014, the La Fondazione NY, a charity aimed at supporting young Italian and American artists, honoured Gabbana, Dolce and Luhrmann at its third awards gala at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. "We live with movies - our inspiration all the time is movies and we make our collection like a movie," Gabbana said during the event.


title: Stefano Gabbana

text: Gabbana appears in the 2013 documentary, "Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's", made about the fashion industry. He also made a cameo appearance in Woody Allen's film "To Rome with Love" in 2012, and was a presenter at the MTV Europe Music Awards in 2002. Gabbana also plays in Giuseppe Tornatore's 1995 movie "The Star Maker" ("L'Uomo delle stelle" in Italian).


title: XMPP

text: Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP, originally named Jabber) is an open communication protocol designed for instant messaging (IM), presence information, and contact list maintenance. Based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), it enables the near-real-time exchange of structured data between two or more network entities. Designed to be extensible, the protocol offers a multitude of applications beyond traditional IM in the broader realm of message-oriented middleware, including signalling for VoIP, video, file transfer, gaming and other uses.


title: XMPP

text: Unlike most commercial instant messaging protocols, XMPP is defined in an open standard in the application layer. The architecture of the XMPP network is similar to email; anyone can run their own XMPP server and there is no central master server. This federated open system approach allows users to interoperate with others on any server using a 'JID' user account, similar to an email address. XMPP implementations can be developed using any software license and many server, client, and library implementations are distributed as free and open-source software. Numerous freeware and commercial software implementations also exist.


title: XMPP

text: Originally developed by the open-source community, the protocols were formalized as an approved instant messaging standard in 2004 and has been continuously developed with new extensions and features. Various XMPP client software are available on both desktop and mobile platforms and devices - by 2003 the protocol was used by over ten million people worldwide on the network, according to the XMPP Standards Foundation.


title: XMPP

text: The XMPP network architecture is reminiscent of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), a client–server model; clients do not talk directly to one another as it is decentralized - anyone can run a server. By design, there is no central authoritative server as there is with messaging services such as AIM, WLM, WhatsApp or Telegram. Some confusion often arises on this point as there is a public XMPP server being run at codice_1, to which many users subscribe. However, anyone may run their own XMPP server on their own domain.


title: XMPP

text: Every user on the network has a unique XMPP address, called "JID" (for historical reasons, XMPP addresses are often called "Jabber IDs"). The JID is structured like an email address with a username and a domain name (or IP address) for the server where that user resides, separated by an at sign (codice_2) - for example, “codice_3“: here codice_4 is the username and codice_5 the server with which the user is registered.


title: XMPP

text: Since a user may wish to log in from multiple locations, they may specify a resource. A resource identifies a particular client belonging to the user (for example home, work, or mobile). This may be included in the JID by appending a slash followed by the name of the resource. For example, the full JID of a user's mobile account could be codice_6.


title: XMPP

text: Each resource may have specified a numerical value called priority. Messages simply sent to codice_7 will go to the client with highest priority, but those sent to codice_6 will go "only" to the mobile client. The highest priority is the one with largest numerical value.


title: XMPP

text: JIDs without a username part are also valid, and may be used for system messages and control of special features on the server. A resource remains optional for these JIDs as well.


title: XMPP

text: The means to route messages based on a logical endpoint identifier - the JID, instead of by an explicit IP Address present opportunities to use XMPP as an Overlay network implementation on top of different underlay networks.


title: XMPP

text: The original and "native" transport protocol for XMPP is Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), using open-ended XML streams over long-lived TCP connections. As an alternative to the TCP transport, the XMPP community has also developed an HTTP transport for web clients as well as users behind restricted firewalls. In the original specification, XMPP could use HTTP in two ways: "polling" and "binding". The polling method, now deprecated, essentially implies messages stored on a server-side database are being fetched (and posted) regularly by an XMPP client by way of HTTP 'GET' and 'POST' requests. The binding method, implemented using "Bidirectional-streams Over Synchronous HTTP" (BOSH), allows servers to push messages to clients as soon as they are sent. This push model of notification is more efficient than polling, where many of the polls return no new data.


title: XMPP

text: Because the client uses HTTP, most firewalls allow clients to fetch and post messages without any hindrances. Thus, in scenarios where the TCP port used by XMPP is blocked, a server can listen on the normal HTTP port and the traffic should pass without problems. Various websites let people sign into XMPP via a browser. Furthermore, there are open public servers that listen on standard http (port 80) and https (port 443) ports, and hence allow connections from behind most firewalls. However, the IANA-registered port for BOSH is actually 5280, not 80.


title: XMPP

text: The XMPP Standards Foundation or XSF (formerly the Jabber Software Foundation) is active in developing open XMPP extensions, so called "XEP". However, extensions can also be defined by any individual, software project, or organization. To maintain interoperability, common extensions are managed by the XSF. XMPP applications beyond IM include: chat rooms, network management, content syndication, collaboration tools, file sharing, gaming, remote systems control and monitoring, geolocation, middleware and cloud computing, VoIP, and identity services.


title: XMPP

text: Building on its capability to support discovery across local network domains, XMPP is well-suited for cloud computing where virtual machines, networks, and firewalls would otherwise present obstacles to alternative service discovery and presence-based solutions. Cloud computing and storage systems rely on various forms of communication over multiple levels, including not only messaging between systems to relay state but also the migration or distribution of larger objects, such as storage or virtual machines. Along with authentication and in-transit data protection, XMPP can be applied at a variety of levels and may prove ideal as an extensible middleware or Message-oriented middleware (MOM) protocol.


title: XMPP

text: At the moment, XMPP does not support Quality of Service (QoS); assured delivery of messages has to be built on top of the XMPP layer. There are two XEPs proposed to deal with this issue, XEP-0184 Message delivery receipts which is currently a draft standard, and XEP-0333 Chat Markers which is considered experimental.


title: XMPP

text: Since XML is text based, normal XMPP has a higher network overhead compared to purely binary solutions. This issue was being addressed by the experimental XEP-0322: Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Format, where XML is serialized in a very efficient binary manner, especially in schema-informed mode. This XEP is currently deferred.


title: XMPP

text: In-band binary data transfer is limited. Binary data must be first base64 encoded before it can be transmitted in-band. Therefore, any significant amount of binary data (e.g., file transfers) is best transmitted out-of-band, using in-band messages to coordinate. The best example of this is the Jingle XMPP Extension Protocol, XEP-0166.


title: XMPP

text: Using the extension called Jingle, XMPP can provide an open means to support machine-to-machine or peer-to-peer communications across a diverse set of networks. This feature is mainly used for IP telephony (VoIP).


title: XMPP

text: XMPP supports conferences with multiple users, using the specification Multi-User Chat (MUC) (XEP-0045). From the point of view of a normal user, it is comparable to Internet Relay Chat (IRC).


title: XMPP

text: XMPP servers can be isolated (e.g., on a company intranet), and secure authentication (SASL) and point-to-point encryption (TLS) have been built into the core XMPP specifications, as well as


title: XMPP

text: Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR) is an extension of XMPP enabling encryption of messages and data. It has since been replaced by a better extension, multi-end-to-multi-end encryption (OMEMO, XEP-0384) end-to-end encryption between users. This gives a higher level of security, by encrypting all data from the source client and decrypting again at the target client; the server operator cannot decrypt the data they are forwarding.


title: XMPP

text: While several service discovery protocols exist today (such as zeroconf or the Service Location Protocol), XMPP provides a solid base for the discovery of services residing locally or across a network, and the availability of these services (via presence information), as specified by XEP-0030 DISCO.


title: XMPP

text: One of the original design goals of the early Jabber open-source community was enabling users to connect to multiple instant messaging systems (especially non-XMPP systems) through a single client application. This was done through entities called "transports" or "gateways" to other instant messaging protocols like ICQ, AIM or Yahoo Messenger, but also to protocols such as SMS, IRC or email. Unlike multi-protocol clients, XMPP provides this access at the server level by communicating via special gateway services running alongside an XMPP server. Any user can "register" with one of these gateways by providing the information needed to log on to that network, and can then communicate with users of that network as though they were XMPP users. Thus, such gateways function as client proxies (the gateway authenticates on the user's behalf on the non-XMPP service). As a result, any client that fully supports XMPP can access any network with a gateway without extra code in the client, and without the need for the client to have direct access to the Internet. However, the client proxy model may violate terms of service on the protocol used (although such terms of service are not legally enforceable in several countries) and also requires the user to send their IM username and password to the third-party site that operates the transport (which may raise privacy and security concerns).


title: XMPP

text: Another type of gateway is a server-to-server gateway, which enables a non-XMPP server deployment to connect to native XMPP servers using the built in interdomain federation features of XMPP. Such server-to-server gateways are offered by several enterprise IM software products, including:


title: XMPP

text: XMPP is implemented by many clients, servers, and code libraries. These implementations are provided under a variety of software licenses.


title: XMPP

text: A large number of XMPP client software exist on various modern and legacy platforms, including both graphical and command line based clients. According to the XMPP website, some of the most popular software include Conversations (Android), Converse.js (web browser, Linux, Windows, macOS), Gajim (Windows, Linux), Monal (macOS, iOS), and Swift.IM (macOS, Windows, Linux).


title: XMPP

text: Other clients include: Bombus, ChatSecure, Coccinella, JWChat.org, MCabber, Miranda NG, Pidgin, Psi, Tkabber, Trillian, and Xabber.


title: XMPP

text: There are thousands of XMPP servers worldwide, many public ones as well as private individuals or organizations running their own servers without commercial intent. Numerous websites show a list of public XMPP servers where users may register at (for example on the XMPP.net website).


title: XMPP

text: Several large public IM services natively use or used XMPP, including LiveJournal's "LJ Talk", Nimbuzz, and HipChat. Various hosting services, such as DreamHost, enable hosting customers to choose XMPP services alongside more traditional web and email services. Specialized XMPP hosting services also exist in form of cloud so that domain owners need not directly run their own XMPP servers, including Cisco Webex Connect, Chrome.pl, Flosoft.biz, i-pobox.net, and hosted.im.


title: XMPP

text: XMPP is also used in deployments of non-IM services, including smart grid systems such as demand response applications, message-oriented middleware, and as a replacement for SMS to provide text messaging on many smartphone clients.


title: XMPP

text: Some of the largest messaging providers use, or have been using, various forms of XMPP based protocols in their backend systems without necessarily exposing this fact to their end users. One example is Google, which in August 2005 introduced Google Talk, a combination VoIP and IM system that uses XMPP for instant messaging and as a base for a voice and file transfer signaling protocol called Jingle. The initial launch did not include server-to-server communications; Google enabled that feature on January 17, 2006. Google later added video functionality to Google Talk, also using the Jingle protocol for signaling. In May 2013, Google announced XMPP compatibility would be dropped from Google Talk for server-to-server federation, although it would retain client-to-server support. Google talk has since been dropped from Google's line of products. In January 2008, AOL introduced experimental XMPP support for its AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) service, allowing AIM users to communicate using XMPP. However, in March 2008, this service was discontinued. As of May 2011, AOL offers limited XMPP support. In February 2010, the social-networking site Facebook opened up its chat feature to third-party applications via XMPP. Some functionality was unavailable through XMPP, and support was dropped in April 2014. Similarly, in December 2011, Microsoft released an XMPP interface to its Microsoft Messenger service. Skype, its de facto successor, also provided limited XMPP support. Apache Wave is another example.


title: XMPP

text: XMPP is the de facto standard for private chat in gaming related platforms such as Origin, and PlayStation, as well as the now discontinued Xfire and Raptr. Two notable exceptions are Steam and Xbox LIVE; both use their own proprietary messaging protocols.


title: XMPP

text: Jeremie Miller began working on the Jabber technology in 1998 and released the first version of the codice_9 server on January 4, 1999. The early Jabber community focused on open-source software, mainly the jabberd server, but its major outcome proved to be the development of the XMPP protocol.


title: XMPP

text: The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) formed an XMPP working group in 2002 to formalize the core protocols as an IETF instant messaging and presence technology. The early Jabber protocol, as developed in 1999 and 2000, formed the basis for XMPP as published in <nowiki>RFC 3920</nowiki> and <nowiki>RFC 3921</nowiki> in October 2004 (the primary changes during formalization by the IETF's XMPP Working Group were the addition of TLS for channel encryption and SASL for authentication). The XMPP Working group also produced specifications <nowiki>RFC 3922</nowiki> and <nowiki>RFC 3923</nowiki>. In 2011, <nowiki>RFC 3920</nowiki> and <nowiki>RFC 3921</nowiki> were superseded by <nowiki>RFC 6120</nowiki> and <nowiki>RFC 6121</nowiki> respectively, with <nowiki>RFC 6122</nowiki> specifying the XMPP address format. In 2015, <nowiki>RFC 6122</nowiki> was superseded by <nowiki>RFC 7622</nowiki>. In addition to these core protocols standardized at the IETF, the XMPP Standards Foundation (formerly the Jabber Software Foundation) is active in developing open XMPP extensions.


title: XMPP

text: The first IM service based on XMPP was Jabber.org, which has operated continuously and offered free accounts since 1999. From 1999 until February 2006, the service used jabberd as its server software, at which time it migrated to ejabberd (both of which are free software application servers). In January 2010, the service migrated to the proprietary M-Link server software produced by Isode Ltd.


title: XMPP

text: In September 2008, Cisco Systems acquired Jabber, Inc., the creators of the commercial product Jabber XCP.


title: XMPP

text: The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) develops and publishes extensions to XMPP through a standards process centered on "XMPP Extension Protocols" (XEPs, previously known as Jabber Enhancement Proposals - JEPs). The following extensions are in especially wide use:


title: XMPP

text: XMPP features such as federation across domains, publish/subscribe, authentication and its security even for mobile endpoints are being used to implement the Internet of Things. Several XMPP extensions are part of the experimental implementation: Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Format; Sensor Data; Provisioning; Control; Concentrators; Discovery.


title: XMPP

text: These efforts are documented on a page in the XMPP wiki dedicated to Internet of Things and the XMPP IoT mailing list.


title: XMPP

text: XMPP has often been regarded as a competitor to SIMPLE, based on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), as the standard protocol for instant messaging and presence notification.


title: XMPP

text: The XMPP extension for multi-user chat can be seen as a competitor to Internet Relay Chat (IRC), although IRC is far simpler, has far fewer features, and is far more widely used.


title: XMPP

text: The XMPP extensions for publish-subscribe provide many of the same features as the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP).


title: Ian Khama

text: Seretse Khama Ian Khama (born 27 February 1953) is a Botswana politician and former military officer who was the fourth President of the Republic of Botswana from 1 April 2008 to 1 April 2018. After serving as Commander of the Botswana Defence Force, he entered politics and was Vice-President of Botswana from 1998 to 2008, then succeeded Festus Mogae as President on 1 April 2008. He won a full term in the 2009 election and was re-elected in October 2014.


title: Ian Khama

text: Ian Khama is the second child of Sir Seretse Khama (1 July 1921 – 13 July 1980), Botswana's foremost independence leader and its president from 1966 to 1980, and Lady Khama. He was born in Chertsey, Surrey, while his father was living in exile in the United Kingdom, due to the opposition by the colonial government and the emergent apartheid regime in South Africa to his marriage to a white woman.


title: Ian Khama

text: He is also the grandson of Sekgoma II (1869–1925), who was the paramount chief of the Bamangwato people, and the great-grandson of Khama III (1837–1923), their king. His great-great grandfather of Kgosikgolo Sekgoma I was Chief of the Bamangwato people (1815–1885). The name "Seretse" means “the clay that binds together”, and was given to his father to celebrate the recent reconciliation of his father and grandfather; this reconciliation assured Seretse Khama's ascension to the throne when his aged father died in 1925. Ian Seretse Khama is named after his father to continue this historical legacy. He is also known simply as Ian Khama to differentiate between himself and his father. Tshekedi Khama II, Ian Khama's brother, was named after their great uncle, Tshekedi Khama who was the regent and guardian for Seretse Khama, the first president of Botswana.


title: Ian Khama

text: Ian Khama was educated at Waterford Kamhlaba, a United World College in Mbabane, and at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He is a qualified pilot. In April 1977, Khama was appointed as a brigadier general at age 24 during Sir Seretse Khama's Presidency, making him the Deputy Commander to late former Vice President Lt. Gen. Mompati Merafhe. He later served as the Commander of the Botswana Defence Force (BDF) from his appointment in 1989, retiring from the position in 1998. During this time, Khama received military honours, including the Founder Officer Medal for being part of the Botswana Defence Force when it was created in 1977, the Duty Code Order for devotion to duty, and the Distinguished Service Medal in 1997 after 20 years of service.


title: Ian Khama

text: Khama, serving as Commander of the Botswana Defence Force, announced on 16 December 1997 that he would retire from his command on 31 March 1998. Because this was the same date as the planned retirement of President Quett Masire, it fueled political speculation about Khama. On 1 April 1998, when Vice-President Festus Mogae succeeded Masire as President, Khama was appointed as the new Vice-President. However, Khama did not hold a seat in the National Assembly, and so could not immediately take office as Vice-President. In early July 1998 he overwhelmingly won a by-election in Serowe North, receiving 2,986 votes against 86 votes for the candidate of the opposition Botswana National Front. On 13 July, he took his seat in the National Assembly and was sworn in as Vice-President. By these actions, he effectively renounced his hitherto unclaimed hereditary chieftaincy, as the constitutional monarchs of modern Botswana are legally barred from actively taking part in party politics. Be this as it may, many traditional Bamangwato continued to recognize him as their chief.


title: Ian Khama

text: Following the victory of the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) in the general election of October 1999, Khama remained Vice-President as well as Minister of Presidential Affairs and Public Administration. Mogae granted Khama a one-year leave later in the year, a decision that the opposition Botswana Congress Party and the Botswana Council of Non-Governmental Organizations sharply criticized. Khama's leave became effective on 1 January 2000. He returned to his duties as Vice-President on 1 September 2000, although he was replaced as Minister of Presidential Affairs and Public Administration at that time.


title: Ian Khama

text: Khama, already a member of the BDP Central Committee, was elected as Chairman of the BDP on 22 July 2003 at a party congress; he defeated the previous Chairman, Ponatshego Kedikilwe, receiving 512 votes against 219 for Kedikilwe. Khama had been backed for the post by President Mogae, paving the way for Khama to eventually succeed Mogae as President.


title: Ian Khama

text: In 2007, Khama appeared on British television in the BBC's "Top Gear" motoring programme, meeting the presenters as they prepared to cross the Makgadikgadi Pan in northern Botswana by car.


title: Ian Khama

text: In April 2022, Ian Khama was summoned by the justice of his country. The former head of state is accused, among other things, of illegal possession of a firearm. The case dates back to 2016.


title: Ian Khama

text: Mogae stepped down, as he had long said he would do, on 1 April 2008; Khama succeeded him as President. At his swearing-in ceremony in Gaborone, Khama said that there would be continuity in policy and no "radical changes", although he said that "a change in style and special emphasis on a number of issues" might be evident, and he emphasized his commitment to democracy. He immediately undertook a major cabinet reshuffle, and he appointed Mompati Merafhe, who had been Foreign Minister, as the new Vice-President. Upon becoming President, Khama left his post as Chairman of the BDP; Daniel Kwelagobe was chosen to replace him. Khama was not elected to the presidency for his first year in office, being appointed due to his position as Vice President. Some political commentators such as Kenneth Good see as a flaw in the electoral system in Botswana.


title: Ian Khama

text: President Khama first articulated his desire to impose a 70% alcohol levy, meant to combat the problem of excessive drinking in Botswana. The practical effect of such a levy was soon seen to have a deleterious effect on the brewing industry, who resisted the imposition of such a levy, along with bars and other drinking establishments. The President later imposed a 30% levy after consulting with industry leaders, including the Botswana Confederation of Commerce, Industry and Manpower. SAB Miller secured British diplomatic representation to attempt to lower the levy.


title: Ian Khama

text: In 2008, The Media Practitioners Act passed into Botswana law, and has been criticized as inhibiting free speech by several outlets. The bill's language seeks to encourage a more professional journalistic standard. The law has proven to be difficult to enforce or implement.


title: Ian Khama

text: In 2009, Khama appeared on CNN's African Voices which painted a positive picture of Khama, and named Botswana an African "success story".


title: Ian Khama

text: In the 2009 Botswana general election, Khama was elected to the first of two terms as president. Politically, Khama's election campaign was dominated by internal squabbling in the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), which was clearly divided into two major factions, the A-Team and the Barata Phati factions. The A-Team was led by President Khama, Jacob Nkate, the former minister of education, and the late former vice president Mompati Merafhe. The Barata Phati faction was led by former BDP secretary general Daniel Kwelagobe, formerly the chairman of the party, the late Gomolemo Motswaledi, and also retired former vice president Ponatshego Kedikilwe, who wished to bring about constitutional reform not only to the BDP but also to the country's constitution. In the run-up to the 2009 elections, Motswaledi, who gave up on his ambition to run for a seat in Serowe in order to make way for Ian Khama's brother, Tshekedi Khama II, was also excluded from representing Gaborone when he ran afoul of President Khama. Motswaledi lost a law suit against Khama when the High Court ruled that the president enjoyed constitutional immunity from litigation by virtue of his position. After this incident, critics accused Khama of authoritarian tendencies; More than half of the BDP central Committee at one time felt that Khama had on many instances acted beyond his powers. Others, including Khama and his legal representation, said that he was simply instilling discipline as part of his role as the head of the party.


title: Ian Khama

text: After the 2009 election, Motswaledi bowed out of the BDP to form another political party, the Botswana Movement for Democracy (BMD).


title: Ian Khama

text: The death of John Kalifatis, whose death resulted during the course of a robbery investigation, occurred early in Khama's presidency. The police statement on Kalifatis reads: "The deceased, John Kalafatis, had a warrant of arrest issued against him on 12 January 2009 for armed robbery among others. All along, he was a fugitive from justice." The officers involved claimed that they mistakenly believed him to be reaching for his firearm at the time of the shooting. Other sources dispute this, and claim that Kalafatis had been executed by members of the Botswana Defense Force. The three members of the BDF responsible for the death of Kalifatis were found guilty of murder, and each sentenced to 11 years in prison. They received a presidential pardon from Khama in 2012. This was seen as proof by some sources that Khama was involved in the killing. The prosecuting lawyer for Kalifatis said “What is his special interest in these particular offenders, how can we not suspect that he had a personal interest in the case…?”