Sinti Alliance Germany

The Sinti Allianz Deutschland ( SAD for short ) is a non-profit, registered association , formerly in Cologne and now in Göttingen . It defined itself as an "association of German Gypsies ( Sinti )" and as a representative of an " autochthonous Sinti ethnic group in the German people" and organized itself in various state and regional associations. Its members were and still are traditionally oriented Roma from the group, primarily the Sinti, but at times also the Lovara . Today's SAD (Göttingen) describes itself “as a platform and political mouthpiece for all those Sinti who, in addition to social and cultural work, primarily do educational work for the Sinti ethnic group”.

history

Today's association emerged from the Sinti Union Cologne , which was founded in 1993 . No details are available about their origins, history and program. The previous association is not mentioned in the studies on the history of the self-organization of Roma in Germany. He is not known from the civil rights movement or is not a member of the association.

The Sinti Alliance Germany was founded in 2000 by "20 tribal representatives" as an association of Sinti from different parts of Germany, when the discussion about a memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe murdered under National Socialism entered the peak . According to its own information, the SAD (Cologne) represented nine Sinti organizations and "a Lowara tribe" as the umbrella organization . It is not known who exactly these member associations were. "Nine independent Sinti organizations" named the following SAD (Hildesheim) in 2014, which did not list the Lovara families. For its successor, the SAD (Göttingen), the following memberships can be proven in 2015: Sinti Union Düsseldorf, Sinti Union Cologne, Verband der Sinti Niedersachsen e. V., Sinti Union Rheinland-Pfalz and Sinti-Union Hessen e. V., which, however, resigned at the end of 2014 “for political reasons”.

Since it was founded, Sintiza Natascha Winter (Cologne), who died in June 2012 and who was already the chair of the predecessor association, has been chairwoman. In 2013, Ricardo Laubinger was appointed First Chairman of the new Hildesheim headquarters. Since 2015, with the relocation to Göttingen, Manja Schuecker-Weiss has been chairwoman and managing director.

Public activities of the SAD (Cologne) or of member associations cannot be determined. The Sinti Alliance stated that it has “mostly been doing its work for many years, in accordance with the Sinti tradition, quietly”. A widely noticed exception was the discussion about the dedication text for a memorial for the Sinti and Roma murdered under National Socialism. She made the association and its chairperson, who remained the only recognizable association spokesperson in this long-standing dispute, known nationwide.

In the dedication text discourse, the Sinti Alliance demanded

• to use the category “ Gypsies ” as the general term for all those persecuted as Gypsies , since the term Roma does not include the Sinti or other groups persecuted as Gypsies, while the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma and other Roma organizations such as the Rome and Cinti Union or the Roma -Union Frankfurt reject this as a pejorative external name and as contaminated by National Socialism and
• To include the Yeniche as a group of victims in the text for the Sinti and Roma memorial.

The Sinti Alliance vehemently attacked the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, which was viewed as an opponent, with numerous public statements. When on December 19, 2008, the official day of remembrance of the Federal Council for the victims of the genocide of the Sinti and Roma, in the presence of 46 guests from the ranks of the Central Council and its member associations, two guests from the Sinti Alliance and three Yeniche people symbolically decided to start construction a spectacular incident occurred that exposed the severity of the conflict.

Basically, the association opposed the dominance of Nazi persecution and genocide, which it claimed, and wishes to see "the peaceful coexistence of the Sinti and the German majority population" more appreciated.

In 2013 the association's headquarters were relocated to Hildesheim. As a comparison of the old and the (now canceled) Hildesheim website shows, the change brought about changes in the company's self-image. Since then, several activities of the Sinti Alliance or member associations have been noticed. The Hildesheim board of directors abandoned the abstinence under Natascha Winter from day-to-day political issues that could be of importance to Sinti by filing a criminal complaint against the NPD in September 2013 for an election poster directed against the minority as inciting, insulting and defamatory. In 2014 there was a meeting with the Federal Commissioner for National Minorities Hartmut Koschyk . The topic was the presentation of a model project to strengthen cultural identity and education for Sinti. Since 2013, the member association Sinti-Union Düsseldorf has been organizing an international Sinti music festival (Django-Reinhardt-Festival) once a year.

Self-image, goals

Public information can be found on the old or new website of the association as well as individual online publications by publishers who are not affiliated with the association. Other forms of communication, e.g. B. printed media, with which the association would inform about its program and its practice, do not yet exist.

As evidenced by its website at the time, the association saw itself until 2013 as representing the interests of those "German Gypsies who feel committed to the traditional way of life of the Sinti with its historically grown rules and prohibitions and who want to maintain this social and cultural order of the Sinti." The SAD (Cologne) stated the goals of the implementation of political and social concerns from the group of Sinti.

• She particularly pointed out that she wanted to protect herself against “unjustified claims to representation and the appropriation of other organizations”, by which the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma was meant, with which she is the more representative, recognized and regular publicly funded self-organization of the minority was in a constant conflict. The Central Council does not adequately represent the Sinti of German citizenship.
• She expressly rejected state measures against the social, cultural, economic or legal discrimination seen by the Central Council and measures to promote socially disadvantaged members of the minority. "(Sinti) as German citizens ... have equal rights in all areas of education, economic, social, political and cultural life in our country" not only in terms of formal law, but also in real terms.
• She objected to the recognition of Romani in schools and universities as a minority language, as it results from the recognition of the German Sinti and Roma as a national and linguistic minority. She turned against the associated consequences such as the academic processing of the language, its written down and standardization, against teaching materials and against the training of Sinti teachers. She spoke out against the request by the Central Council to include Romani in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages because it "contains state funding obligations". The language of the Sinti is not written and has to remain so. It is subject to a taboo and the language taboo must not be violated under any circumstances. “The protective mechanisms to preserve our culture, which also includes the language”, would be “undermined” as a result of the application of the language charter. On the way through the systematic learning of the Sinti Romanes (which many Sinti no longer or only to a limited extent ) In remedial courses, the language charter could be "abused as an article of naturalization" by non-German immigrants belonging to other Roma groups.
• The association is particularly concerned with understanding between German majority society and Sinti.

In 2014, SAD (Hildesheim) formulated its "political and social concerns":

• increasing the “acceptance of education, training and further training in the Sinti ethnic group”, promoting education and training for Sinti and “integrating Sinti into the labor market”. This is where the “current main task” lies.
• the fight against the word "Sinti and Roma", since Sinti would consider themselves an "independent ethnic group" within German society and the word pair as a construct and external name would be "vehemently rejected by the majority of Sinti in Germany". Universally and without further distinctions, the authors brought together all existing Romance-speaking groups, with the exception of the German Sinti, as "Roma" and foreigners, including the Eastern European Roma who migrated to Germany in the 19th century and who have since long been German. She contrasted these population groups, which can only be designated as “Roma”, with the group of Sinti.
• the fight against unjustified representation claims and the appropriation by other organizations, which addresses the umbrella organization “Central Council of German Sinti and Roma”.
• state funding that has "hardly" existed so far
• It is to be rejected that schools, universities or other state institutions ("offices") deal with the history, culture, language and values ​​of the German Sinti or that something in Romani is published in the media, such as state funding obligations in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. That is what the Sinti family is all for.
• Maintaining the traditional, strict regulations for family and private life, i.e. above all the “avoidance, purity and contact rules”.

Unlike the SAD (Cologne), the SAD (Hildesheim) no longer used the term "gypsy".

Today's SAD (Göttingen) formulates its self-image in a “position paper” that contains a catalog of “demands and goals”. Accordingly, in the following order, the main objectives are:

• “Special projects to promote education and training for Sinti”, as there are still above-average training and education deficits.
• "No funding of antiziganism research and antiziganism projects from public funds," as that is a waste of money. Nobody from the minority benefits from it. The "so-called antiziganism" is only a construct and "one-sided". There are prejudices in both the majority and the minority.

A basic distinction should be made in this context: Sinti, on the one hand, and Eastern and Southern European Roma, on the other, constitute two fundamentally different ethnic groups. Different personality collectives are then described in each case. Unlike in central and western Europe for the group of Sinti, Eastern and Southern European Roma are exposed to "persistent discrimination and exclusion" and, unlike in the first case, this has brought about "survival strategies", "which they also use here as refugees in the West ”and which“ would of course also lead to corresponding problems ”. The two opposing personality types explained each other culturally (“differently socialized”). Elsewhere, the association concretizes the alleged problem by taking up the opinion that Roma migrating from Eastern to Central Europe are all “foreign asylum seekers” or “criminal groups immigrated from the Balkans in connection with prostitution, criminal acquisitions, etc.” “He does not formulate a demarcation from these stigmatizing expressions of opinion.

• "Transparency and control for the allocation of funding ... to the ethnic group in the form of project funds, institutional funding and state contracts." "Equal funding of several umbrella organizations alongside one another" must be introduced. Because there are only two associations of German autochthonous Roma operating at the federal level, the more important Central Council of German Sinti and Roma is addressed, to which the majority of the funds go, as it has various state and social recognition as "the civil and political representation of interests of the German Sinti and Roma “Experiences and also appears internationally and is of importance.
• “Recognition of the Sinti as an independent national minority in Germany” apart from the other Roma groups in Germany, including the German Roma of originally Eastern European origin who have lived here for around 150 years
• "Recognition of the Sinti as a separate ethnic group at European level". They refuse to assign the Sinti to the European Roma minority.
• “Strengthening the Roma” in favor of a separate “political self-organization independent of the Sinti” and “independent of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma”.
• “Cultural and social strengthening of the Sinti on site”.

Unlike the SAD (Cologne), the SAD (Göttingen) no longer uses the term “gypsy”. It is not a designation of a people, but a collective term that is very controversial today for different ethnic and social groups, which contains the "controversial" ascriptions "unsteady, unbound, way of life that deviates from the majority population and transcends legal boundaries".

Web links

• former website of the Sinti Alliance based in Cologne
• Today's website of the Sinti Alliance based in Göttingen

Individual evidence

1. ↑ One of the rare personal reports is a letter to the editor from the chairwoman of the Sinti Union in Cologne in the Frankfurter Rundschau (September 15, 1994) on the two articles In Focus. Commemoration of the forgotten Holocaust and To the point: Sinti, Roma, Gypsies (FR, August 3, 1994).
2. ↑ See: Katrin Reemtsma : Sinti and Roma. History, culture, present. Munich 1996, pp. 136-144; Yaron Matras : The Development of the Romani Civil Rights Movement in Germany 1945–1996. In: Susan Tebbutt (Ed.): Sinti and Roma. Gypsies in German-Speaking Society and Literature. New York / Oxford 1998, pp. 49-63. As evidenced by: [1] .
3. ↑ As evidenced by an existing online copy of the original website, which has since been deleted ( [2] ) and from which the following quotations are also taken.
4. ^ HP Sinti-Allianz (Cologne): [3] .
5. ^ Statement by the Sinti Alliance Germany [Hildesheim] on the Fourth Report of the Federal Republic of Germany in accordance with Article 25 Paragraph 2 of the Framework Convention of the Council of Europe for the Protection of National Minorities. In: Federal Ministry of the Interior, Fourth Report of the Federal Republic of Germany according to Article 25 Paragraph 2 of the Framework Convention of the Council of Europe for the Protection of National Minorities Berlin 2014, p. 114, [ Archived copy ( memento of the original from 23 June 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: Der Archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ]. 
6. ↑ See homepage: [D_d: http://heyevent.de/venue/bfhrta4hasokwa ] or homepage of the Sinti Alliance: Archived copy ( memento of the original from June 7, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and still Not checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
7. ↑ See HP: [4]
8. ↑ See homepage: [5] (not to be confused with the Lower Saxony Association of German Sinti eV [6] ).
9. ↑ See homepage: http://www.sinti-portal.de/
10. ↑ See Bundespresseportal, [7] .
11. ↑ Page of the Sinti Alliance Germany, Headquarters Göttingen ( Memento of the original from June 7, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Archived copy ( memento of the original dated June 7, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .  
12. ↑ focus online, February 2, 2009: [8] .
13. ↑ Copy of the old website circulating on the net: [9] , archived copy ( memento of the original of October 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
14. ↑ [10] .
15. ↑ [11] .
16. ↑ See HP ZAKK-Düsseldorf: [12] .
17. ↑ Unless otherwise stated, all of the following information is based on: [13] .
18. ↑ All information according to: Statement of the Sinti Allianz Deutschland [Hildesheim] on the Fourth Report of the Federal Republic of Germany according to Article 25 Paragraph 2 of the Framework Convention of the Council of Europe for the Protection of National Minorities, in: Federal Ministry of the Interior, Fourth Report of the Federal Republic of Germany according to Article 25 Paragraph 2 of the Framework Convention of the Council of Europe for the Protection of National Minorities Berlin 2014, p. 114, [ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated June 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ]. 
19. ↑ Statement of the Sinti Allianz Deutschland [Hildesheim] on the Fourth Report of the Federal Republic of Germany according to Article 25 Paragraph 2 of the Framework Convention of the Council of Europe for the Protection of National Minorities, in: Federal Ministry of the Interior, Fourth Report of the Federal Republic of Germany according to Article 25 Paragraph 2 of the Framework Convention of the Council of Europe on the protection of national minorities Berlin 2014, p. 117, [ Archived copy ( memento of the original from 23 September 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ]; see. also: Federal Ministry of the Interior, National Minorities, Minority and Regional Languages ​​in Germany, Berlin 2014, p. 38 ([ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated June 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. ]).  
20. ↑ See: [14] .
21. ↑ See also: Archived copy ( Memento of the original from June 7, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
22. ^ Position paper of SAD (Göttingen), p. 6: [15] .
23. ^ Open letter to Romani Rose, Chairman of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, February 1, 2015, see [16] .
24. ↑ Federal Ministry of the Interior, National Minorities, Minority and Regional Languages, in Germany, Berlin 2014, p. 38, [ Archived copy ( memento of the original from June 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked . Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ]. 
25. ^ Position paper of SAD (Göttingen), p. 6: [17] .