Perceptions on minorities in Romania

Introduction

Romania has many minorities – in this moment according law we have 18 ethnic minorities represented in Parliament plus Hungarians and Roma (Gypsies) which has own parties. Of course there are immigrants, from Middle and Far East, main groups being Arabians and Chinese. These groups are not Romanian citizens and they are living in Romania doing all kind of business.

Regarding officially recognized main minorities, Hungarians represent ca. 6.5% of total population, concentrated in Central region of Romania and Roma (gypsies) which are spread allover Romania. Roma population is not entirely recorded, most of them declaring that they are Romanians or Hungarians, according the region where they live. Last Census (2002) recoded ca. 550.000 Roma population, but the number claimed by the Roma organizations varies between 2 and 3 millions. Rest of minorities is under 60.000 people, meaning under 0.3% of total population.

Research on minorities perception in Romania

"Elie Wiesel" National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania decided to obtain information regarding minorities’ perception in Romania and conducted a survey in May 2007 on this topic.

Methodology used for the survey:

• Research type: Omnibus survey

• Data collection period: 25 April – 3 May 2007

• Sample: 1 026 respondents, error margin of ±3.06%.

• Target respondents: National representative sample for Romanian population aged 15 years and more. Representative by gender, age, residence and region according National Statistic and Economic Studies official data.

• Random selection of respondents, using random route for selecting households, with statistical step according area type, and next birthday rule for respondent selection in the household.

• Data collection method: face to face interviews using a structured questionnaire.

Main results

1. Minorities’ perception is not negative for most of Romanians:

• Only a small proportion of Romanians perceive some minorities living in Romania as a threat, Roma (14%) and Hungarians (11%) being minorities which record highest scores on this. These two minorities are mentioned also for affirmation that they represent a problem for Romania (33% - Roma and 18% - Hungarians), but are not a threat.

• Jews are rather perceived in a neural manner by ca. 1/3 of all Romanian respondents, being not a problem, but not an advantage for Romania. This minority benefit also of positive appreciations, 15% of respondents considering that Jews has a useful contribution in certain regions and occupations and 11% declaring that they are a valuable resource for our country.

2. Minorities’ rights perception is almost the same for all people living in Romania.

Some “positive discrimination” for Hungarians (e.g. mother’s tongue education, double citizenship offered by Hungary) and for Roma (e.g. a number of places with free access – no competition - in public high-school and colleges/ universities) make some of Romanians to appreciate that these two minorities has more rights than the majority.

• Most of respondents (58-71%) consider that minorities has same rights as all other Romanian citizens.

• There are some respondents which consider that Hungarian minority has more rights than Romanian majority (20%), and 10% has this opinion about Roma minority.

3. Social distance was measured using Bogardus scale, where 1 represent the closest accepted relation with people from a certain minority (Family member) and 7 the distant (Should not come in Romania). This measurement shows a similar tolerance for all minorities, but with a greater distance of Romanians toward Roma and Arabians. People with higher education are more tolerant, but for these two groups the increase of tolerance related to education was lower.

• We can see that there is a greater tolerance toward Jews (4.23) and Hungarians (4.21) and a significantly lower tolerance regarding Roma (5.14) and Arabs (5.18).

• This distance becomes smaller when respondent’s education is higher regarding Jews, from 4.41 for people with general education to 3.66 for high education and in a similar way for Hungarians (from 4.35 to 3.85 to educational extremes).

• For Roma and Arabs there are no significant differences, the social distance regarding those two minorities remaining similar for all educational levels.

• A smaller social distance regarding Jews is supported by the fact that those are accepted in the family (7%), in friends group (12%) or as neighbors (10%) and by small proportion - 7% of all respondents declares that Jews should not come in Romania.

• Regarding Hungarians, Romanians has a similar comportment for accepting them as family members (12%), in friends group (11%) or as neighbors (7%) and only 9% declares that Hungarians should not come in Romania.

• Roma are better accepted than Arabs to live in Romania, 34% of all respondents agree that for Roma and 22% for Arabs. Both these two groups has a similar weak position for other closer variants (e.g. only 2% agree to have Roma in family, 5% to have in friends group and 6% accept to have people from this minority as neighbors, and 19% of Romanians want that Roma don’t come in Romania).

Conclusions

We can see from this survey that Romanians are tolerant to all minorities and they don’t reject categorically any of these.

They perceive in a correct way the rights for different minorities and recognize the value of each minority.