Dale Farm The dilemma
The Traveller's dilemma is an ongoing global problem. When a community’s culture clashes with their legal rights, who should compromise?
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Dale Farm looks like a bomb has hit it. As we pull up to the dirt road at the front of this site, which in recent months has become the frontline of conflict between Irish Travellers and Basildon Council, an uncomfortable tension hangs in the air. Today, TV vans line the road and newspaper reporters and freelance journalists stand around chatting to activists and residents. The conversation is light and jovial but beyond the bustle, darkness lurks.
Less than a month ago, around 400 residents of this once 1000-strong community were forcibly evicted for illegally living on green belt land – areas of countryside around UK cities ring-fenced to control urban sprawl. Although forty Romani Gypsy families were granted planning permission to live on Oak Lane, the land next to Dale Farm, between 1992 and 1996, the Irish Travellers who bought the neighbouring scrap yard in 2001, were not granted planning permission to live on it.
After more than ten years of legal battles, Basildon council were authorised by the high court to remove the Travellers on 19 October. At least 100 riot police entered the site, two people were tasered, homes were dug up and moved on or placed in storage (at a cost the Travellers must cover), and Basildon Council racked up an official bill of £18 million (although many estimate it's more like £20 million by now).
The fruit of all that labour is this battlefield before us. There are huge trenches where homes used to be, and a grid of massive bund walls – made loosely with soil and scrap – make it impossible for residents of legal plots to access their properties. Rallying cries like 'Resist', 'Home', and 'If not a scrap yard, then where?' are scrawled across fences that still stand. A hand-painted signpost – that facetiously points to 'Gaza', 'Tripoli' and other infamous war zones – is marooned on a heap of rubble. The residents that have planning permission to remain here permanently must live among this detritus. Children are dodging puddles and rats. It's a pretty apocalyptic scene.
But how did it come to this? Is this mess the fallout of a legal battle, or the inability for two societies to live side by side? Is tension, protest and forced eviction the only possible outcome when one community’s culture and values clash with how society defines our legal rights? And who, if anyone, should compromise? This much is sure; there are no solutions in this mud.
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Romani Gypsies and Irish Travellers are two separate ethnic minorities. “But we've been thrown together by qualities that, from a distance, look the same,” says Romani rights activist, professor and historian Ian Hancock, now based at the University of Austin, Texas. As Director of Romani Studies, Hancock is responsible for the Romani Archives and Documentation Center – the largest repository of authentic Romani materials in the world. Like many minority group activists before him, he is undertaking the arduous task of rewriting the Romani canon and rescuing it from prejudice and myth.
“It's not just for Romani people, it's for everybody. My primary mission is to educate not only our own people, but the non-Romani world as well. Because the so-called ‘Gypsy image’ is much better known than the reality... We lost our own history centuries ago,” says Hancock, adding that illiteracy and persecution have been to blame. “So we’ve never been able to tell outsiders who we are or where we came from. That’s why we got called Egyptians [shortened to 'Gypsy']. We’re not from Egypt! But that was some exotic place across the Mediterranean and the name stuck.”
Romani Gypsies actually descend from India, and it's likely they emigrated west in the eleventh century due to war and conflict. They have lived in Europe and the United States ever since, with an international population of about 12 million. “There are more Romanis in Europe than Swedes or Danes or Macedonians,” says Hancock. “We’re in every country, how European can you get? Yet our language, culture and bloodline is not European. It’s bizarre.”
The origins of Irish Travellers are equally complex. In her book Irish Travellers: Racism and the Politics of Culture, Professor Jane Helleiner suggests that no single event marks the emergence of a nomadic population in Ireland. “Travellers in Ireland have been constructed, and have constructed themselves, as an indigenous minority,” writes Helleiner. “The origin account that emerged in the fifties portrayed Irish Travellers as the descendants of peasants forced into landlessness and mobility by the evictions and famines suffered by the Irish during the centuries of British domination... But activists like Nan Joyce have pointed to earlier theories that trace Traveller origins to a much older, pre-colonial Ireland.”
Check out HUCK #30 for the full feature.
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Dale Farm (text) by Shelley Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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