Ion Cioaba

Ion Cioaba, self-proclaimed gypsy king, died on February 23rd 1997, aged 62

When Ion Cioaba proclaimed himself King of all the Gypsies Everywhere he found himself short of loyal subjects. About 5,000 followers turned up for his coronation in Romania in 1992 at a monastery he had borrowed for the occasion. They cheered as a solid gold crown, made in Switzerland, was lowered on to his head. But many other gypsies “everywhere” – some 10m in 40 countries – felt that the notion of kingship contradicted their scattered existence.

Unlike the other great diaspora, the Jews, the gypsies have never desired their own nation state. If they had, it would not have been Mr Cioaba’s Romania. It would have been somewhere in central India, from which a low caste tribe, the Dom, famous for its singing and dancing, fled to escape from Muslim invaders. Dom became corrupted into Rom, hence Romany, the gypsy language, a mixture of Sanskrit and acquired words. (Gypsy was the name given to the tribe by the English, in the erroneous belief that it had originated in Egypt.)

Whatever Ion Cioaba’s ungypsylike ambitions, no one doubted that he did his best for his much maligned people. Perhaps because of their chosen exclusivity, gypsies are often seen as a threat by communities close to their encampments. Not even the politically correct have fought to suppress the nursery rhyme, “My mother said that I never should / Play with the gypsies in the wood”. The Soviet Union sought to suppress the gypsy culture, tried to get gypsies to assimilate, and had the ultimate sanction of the gulag. In the United States, which has more than 1m gypsies, some states have passed laws banning fortune telling, a move apparently directed against gypsy women. However, American gypsies appear to be well organised, with the country divided into “economic territories”, each controlled by a gypsy group.

Romanian gypsies had the misfortune to live under, first, a fascist dictatorship and then a communist one. During the second world war several members of Mr Cioaba’s family were among the 40,000 Romanian gypsies deported to German concentration camps (where more than 500,000 gypsies from European counties died: Auschwitz had its own gypsy section).

The post-war ruler, Nicolae Ceausescu, did not persecute the gypsies – at least no more than he exercised a rule of fear over all Romanians. Gypsies gave up wearing in public the gold earrings and other ornaments they were fond of, knowing that the police would seize them. But their closed society gave them some protection from the excesses of the state. Gypsies traditionally do not marry non-gypsies and they avoid inessential dealings with them, preferring to work for themselves. They have their own god, called Del, but no clergy, although some are Roman Catholic or Orthodox Christian. They have purity codes and are pacifists. That said, anyone who attends the World Romany Congress is likely to bump into academics, scientists and others with jobs usually held by gaujes, Romany for outsiders. They are happy to be thought of as gypsies, just as American Indians who become industrialists like to tell of ancestors who fought against Custer.

Mr Cioaba kept a foot in both worlds. Some of his critics said he had collaborated with the Ceausescu regime. He was president of a state-registered trade union, the unlikely sounding Union of Nomadic Metalworking Gypsies, but this may have arisen simply because his clanspeople were metalworkers. In 1986, accused of cheating the government over a copper deal, he was jailed and, he said, tortured. He claimed that the real reason for his imprisonment was that he made himself a nuisance by demanding rights for gypsies.

He drove a Mercedes car, which upset some Romanians. But not all gypsies are poor. Mr Cioaba belonged to the Kalerash, a rich gypsy clan. At any rate, when the Ceausescu regime was toppled in December 1989 Mr Cioaba was judged to be on the right side and served on the Provisional National Council, the country’s frail start towards the democracy it achieved only in 1996. In a triumph for bureaucratic language, Romania formally recognised gypsies as a “transnational non-territorial minority”. Mr Cioaba formed the Gypsy Party and stood for parliament. But neither he nor the party got anywhere.He turned to the world stage and claimed to be the United Nations spokesman for gypsies everywhere. He demanded that gypsy children be accepted in their local schools, and set up a centre for teaching adult gypsies to read and write (Mr Cioaba was illiterate).

In an interview with a German television company, Ion Cioaba argued for compensation for the families of gypsies who died in the camps, and some money has since been paid. But the gypsy life disturbs the German sense of order. Because of this, and worries about its unemployed, Germany has been deporting gypsies to the countries from which they migrated. Mr Cioaba did not much care for national borders. Gypsies, he said, were the only true pan-Europeans. There’s a thought.