Despre ce se întâmplă cu românii din Marea Britanie

Românii din Marea Britanie suferă oleacă de discriminare. Un student român (Andrei Gurlui) din Marea Britanie a scris următoarea treabă pe Facebook: (pare lung textul, dar e interesant)

Dear friends, please read this and share your thoughts. It’s long, but please bear with it. Last night I went to the Fat Freddy’s Drop concert at the O2 Academy Brixton, with two friends, a guy and a girl, all of us Romanians. Them two had traveled from Glasgow especially for this concert. We arrived at the venue and took a place in the queue outside, as we waited for the doors to open. (Actually, as I am writing this waiting for the tube, I can hear a Romanian man using very colourful language while on the phone with a friend back home, I suppose). The area around the venue was not very busy yet, and I noticed 2 men across the road looking and pointing at us while we walked towards the back of the queue. ‘Pickpockets’, I thought, and said nothing to my friends. We ate some food and drank our water, cause they don’t allow you with bottles inside and the venue’s prices are extortionate to say the least.

I still felt a bit of a hostile atmosphere from across the road, there was now a police officer close to those men and they were staring into the queue. Again, said nothing to my friends, maybe I was being a bit paranoid. As the queue got bigger, it started to feel more like a gig and the doors opened. We advanced, tickets in our hands, just about to show them to the bouncers, when a brunette lady, all dressed in black, opens the security fence and tells us to come with her. We conform, half-asking what this is about, quite stunned. Her first question is where we got our tickets from, while she takes us across the road. We give our respective answers (I bought it off someone on Facebook, my friends bought them from a website).

Then, she asks us who’s playing tonight and if we know any songs (?!). I already felt very weird about this and like I was being interrogated, but I blurted out some song names, to which she looked at me like an idiot, of course she didn’t know any of them, it was a trick-question. Her next question was if we are Romanians and upon our answer she started to talk to us in Romanian, surprise surprise! We kept asking what this is about and meanwhile, the two young English gentlemen who were staring at us before flashed their badges at us and revealed themselves to be police, dressed in civilians though.

They asked for our IDs and phones and we foolishly took them out, but still asking why and what this is about. I was suspicious that this might be some sort of a scam (after all there was a Romanian lady involved!) but felt more at ease when after noticing 2 uniformed police officers around us. Finally the older English policeman dressed as a civilian started telling us that unfortunately we have been stopped because there has been a high number of phone thefts done by a criminal gang of Romanian nationals at that venue. My friend interrupted him with an indignated ‘Excuse me?!’ and then he carried on explaining to us, in a pretty accusatory manner, that there have been 400 phones stolen from that venue in the past year and that they have a list of about 100 Romanians connected to those thefts.

Before and during this we were also asked repeatedly if we’ve ever been arrested (none of us have). He said that our information will be checked and we’ll see after. We kept arguing our case that we’ve lost our place in the queue and that this is very unfair. We spoke to the Romanian lady (who I think works for security at the O2 Academy) after I said that I feel like the last man on Earth (a Romanian expression, basically means that I feel humiliated) and asked her if she picked us out from the queue because she knew we were Romanians? She denied that, saying that she didn’t know that we were Romanians and that’s why she spoke to us in English before realising. Might be bullshit but I believe her, however her other point was that they also pull ‘Spanish, Italian, Portuguese’ people. So basically people of other nationalities who look Romanian, LOL. As we waited for our information to be verified, our passports and phones still in the hands of the cops, I asked the main officer on what basis did he specifically pull us out of the queue. He clearly said, on the way we look, because we look Romanian. No bullshit from him. The last thing I said was that this is not pleasant at all, and a colleague of his started telling me that he could show me hundreds of pages with thefts done by Romanians. ‘But not by me’, I said. ‘How do we know that?’ he said.

The main officer told me that if I want to blame someone, I should blame those Romanians who commit those crimes. Should I? My friends were still asking the officers questions but we were soon cleared to be clean and released. No apology, nothing. Needless to say, we were quite shaken up and upset by the whole incident, even angry. It’s not what you expect to happen when you go to a concert in a free country. I know that they were doing their jobs and trying to keep thieves out of the venue, but the suspicious and invasive way in which they do it, I find that disgraceful. Had they pulled us to the side, presented themselves and explained the situation first, and only after that ask us questions and demand to see our IDs and our phones, we might have felt more comfortable. Also if this had been done by a uniformed officer, not by four persons dressed in black clothes who passed around our IDs and phones like they were toys, not knowing who’s got what and which is whose.

I’m not writing this to feel better about myself or to defend myself in anyway. I despise thieving and hate thieves. But it’s a mere coincidence that some criminals were born in Romania, and I was also born there. I do not represent Romania as a whole and those thieves do not represent me, I am also not responsible for what someone I don’t know does, although I try to set a good example. Anyways, I just wanted to warn Romanians in the UK about this and to know what my friends of all nationalities think about this, have my rights been stamped on, can I file a complaint, do you think they were right? I’ve faced discrimination in France before, but it’s the first time here, first time of many, I think. Will I be stopped from going into a shop next? Makes me seriously think of getting a British citizenship or just going to live in a hut on a deserted island. The gig was great, by the way.

Rezumând: 3 români s-au dus în Londra la un concert. Stând în coadă, în fața locului în care urma să aibă concertul, au observat vizavi de ei 2 oameni care-i tot arătau cu degetul. Apoi o doamnă i-a scos din linie și i-a luat la întrebări. Dacă-s români. De unde au biletele pentru concert. Ce melodii cântă trupa care urma să aibă concertul.

Ulterior s-a adeverit că cei de vizavi și inclusiv doamna ce i-a scos din coadă erau polițiști. Și căutau hoți români.

După 15 minute de “interogare” pe stradă cei 3 români au fost “eliberați”.

Da, chestia asta este discriminare. Dar, totodată, dacă stau să întorc povestea pe dos, să mut povestea în București și să înlociesc cei 3 români cu 3 țigani, pun pariu că românii din jurul celor 3 ar considera interveniția poliției ca fiind una “firească”, ba chiar “apreciată”.

Și am zis de țigani pentru că ei sunt cei mai discriminați în clipa de față în România.

Poliția are dreptul de a te legitima. E firesc. E normal. E responsabilitatea lor să facă asta. Deci n-au greșit cu nimic.

Dar, da, poate fi enervant. M-aș fi simțit ca ultimul om să trec prin așa ceva, exact cum scrie autorul textului de mai sus.

E nasol. Dar… e necesar.

Campania ROM (ciocolata aia cu rom…) de a schimba imaginea României ar fi concluzia mea: e responsabilitatea noastră să arătam că prejudecățile lor sunt false.

---