In 1966 a law that made abortion illegal and any method of contraception for women younger than 45 years of age, Nicolae Ceausescu put in place the first round of its policy of magnitude: double the Romanian population and with it the labor force by 2000.
The consequences were not exactly the ones waiting by the dictator.
least 140,000 abandoned children in Bucharest alone, the exponential increase of 60% of clandestine abortions, often with fatal outcomes for women and the construction of dozens of orphanages scattered in remote areas of the state.
Of all the world he would have realized only years later to the collapse of the pro-communist Ceausescu.
At that time, moved to pity by the cruelty of the pictures of starving children, mutilated and made mad by suffering endured, the international public opinion is mobilized compact creating an incredible chain of international adoptions, often sponsored by agencies ghost, not entirely unrelated to the actual sale of children.
Then came 2001 and the Government, concerned about the increasing reports of child trafficking against so-called adoption agencies, stopped international adoptions in progress, Romania had decided to keep the orphanages and work so that their conditions would improve .
So it was, in the last 20 years the Romanian policy has led to a significant improvement of living conditions of orphans and many hitherto handicapped outcasts of society.
But despite the progress in a sense, today we start with a new army of unwanted ghosts are not too different from orphans 90s: the Roma.
Deprived of their identity from Ceausescu, systematically driven from the city where the dictator had confined them to prevent them from wandering after his fall, unable to find its identity, the Roma survive today abandoned on the edge of the city of their own country .
The consequences of such a major hardship visited upon the children.
left to themselves when they are too small to work, even harassed by their own parents when they are enough, sometimes illiterate, they move like ghosts in the Romanian cities and countryside in search of anything that is edible or worth the money, at worst prostituting themselves to obtain it.
In cases where the state intervenes with family allowances, little or nothing of that money is spent by families for their children, who often are not even born in the eyes of the state.
Examples are the dozens of children who sleep on manhole covers for warmth in the crowded Bucharest, often washed down with gum to not feel hunger or cold or thirst. It is
Mihaela, 12 years old Vrancea, solely responsible for the nephew of one year perpetually attached to his neck, which has long complained the police prostitution but denied that the family firm, lying.
Mihaela never talks about this, maybe he soon learned to keep quiet, or perhaps simply considers the abnormal as normal for his life.
The Roma are the second largest minority after the Hungarians in the country, around 600,000 for the Government, but would almost 2,000,000 workers for NGOs in the place. What
minority have a whole series of laws to their full protection, the best legislation on the protection of minorities in Europe has been drawn fully implemented by Romania and it is proudly displayed in the constitution or in national laws, but no of these is really respected, or even worse, implemented. So
poverty persists for many Roma families in Romania, the deplorable conditions of children living on the street more that the home and the few which have an environment family that can be called the ghetto survived the classes formally abolished in 2007, but still found throughout the country, non-implementation of the obligation of school attendance up to Class II.
Yet, while the tragedy of children confined in orphanages regime has shaken our conscience and activates the history of Roma children as that of Mihaela and others are slowly erased from memory.
Why is atavistic distrust of the Roma, a kind of rejection that is difficult to control, assimilate, and eliminate in their eyes the more the people not to be found not too distant past that Romania fiercely try to forget, simply because ourselves we have already forgotten.
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