Many anti-Roma protestors have been vandalizing families homes in Gabrovo, Bulgaria. One of the saddest ones was recent and it was the family of Vasil Velichkow Hristov. This included his six young grandchildren listened as an angry mob chanted threats and racial slurs. The things that this family had to hear are extremely upsetting and shocking that someone can say this to another person. “Come out, Roma, we’ll make soap out of you,” was one of the clear things they yelled. It’s heartbreaking because it was once a positive example of integration of the ethnic Roma community in Bulgaria, the northern central city of Gabrovo has been engulfed by racist violence and anti-Roma protests since April 10. For 4 consecutive nights, ethnic Bulgarians, armed with harmful weapons such as metal batons, took to the cobblestone streets to demand that Gabrovo gets rid of their Roma community. They smashed windows, threatened to kill the Roma, and set multiple their homes on fire, burning to the ground their belongings, terrifying families, and leaving the lives they had built here in ruins. Bulgaria is the poorest member of the EU, and home to one of the continent’s largest Roma populations. About 750,000 people in Bulgaria are part of the Roma population.
My Source
This event reminds me of the events and the action that was taken after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated during the Civil Rights Movement. MLK Jr. kept the movement and the protests peaceful. But once he was killed people lost control and took harmful actions. Riots and protests became deadly and destructive. Both of these were acts of humans hating other humans. Racism is more prevalent in the Bulgaria protests right now, but was still one of the biggest issues of the Civil Rights Movements.
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