Policing the Roma in the Service of Whiteness. Post-Pandemic Reflections from Bulgaria
By Francesco Trupia
After the World Health Organisation declared the pandemic outbreak in March 2020, some pundits and scholars touted the SARS-CoV-2 infection as a “great equalizer”. However, minority groups and indigenous people bore the brunt of the epidemiological crisis worldwide [1].
In Bulgaria, state authorities declared a state of emergency as the first cases were registered within the country. Most citizens were forced to stay home while, at the same time, Roma-majority clusters were forced to comply with an ambiguously timed quarantine. Once the Bulgarian enforcement police began to cordon off Roma neighbourhoods, checkpoints were set up on the edges of the same areas. Drones with thermal sensors flew above Roma neighbourhoods in Burgas to detect any fever outbreak among residents. A plane also sprayed disinfectant on Roma houses in Yambol. Further research shows that tens of Roma quarters came systematically under surveillance [2].
Generally muzzled like ghettos of ringleaders, phone scammers, vote sellers, prostitutes, and beggars, Roma quarters were a priori depicted as hotbeds of infection. Their residents, already racially marked by skin colour, were given a new sense of identification through the social imaginary of a “diseased community”, whose “virus carriers” were the only recipients of public resources and social benefits.

Infection cases were neither recorded adequately nor particularly identified among Roma communities [3]. Of all Eastern European countries, Bulgaria emerged as the most heavily affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, as suggested by excess mortality analysis. Worldwide, the country ranks 87th for the number of infected per million inhabitants (over 187,000) and second (only after Peru) according to the death rate. The vaccination campaign resulted in only 34% of the population with two doses, leaving Bulgaria in last place in the European Union [4].
The pandemic outbreak turned out to be an auspicious opportunity to further scapegoat Roma groups, accused of exploiting the national healthcare system. Tellingly, the then-Bulgarian health minister allowed football fans to attend an important match at the national stadium in downtown Sofia [5]. At the same time, mass testing was barely organized, but mandatory testing was requested for Roma [6]. During the first pandemic shockwave, Roma communities faced a higher risk of infection due to their precarious employment conditions in the economic sectors of garment, textile, and shoe factories. Many were denied getting off the patrolled areas to set up their stands in the open markets or even withdraw pensions and cash from ATMs placed outside their place of residence [7].
When tensions between Roma residents and the Bulgarian enforcement police erupted into street violence, media outlets bestowed on Roma groups with the racial slurs of “Gypsy crime” and “indecent behaviour” to the broader public. In particular, Roma were referred to as an out-of-control community challenging the “order” (реда) at a time when potential breaches of “emergency rules” (извънредни мерки) could put the whole society at risk. Any outlaw actions were taken care of by the “police field officers” (ролята на пъдар), whose role echoed the colonial surveillance over a field, a marked-off area, a land, from trespassers or animals [8]. Furthermore, the extension of the application of Article 326 of the Penalty Code was also timely suspicious. Within sealed-off quarters, Roma could have been easily criminalized for apparently unmotivated calls reporting fake bomb alerts and violence to the police, fire brigade, and ambulance workers by calling 112 without actually needing their assistance.
In the Balkans, such “white enclosures” were nothing new [9]. Piro Rexhepi contends that postsocialist policies of coercion and control (and care, my emphasis) show the longue durée of biopolitical population management, which is anchored in the colonial and modern framework [that] seeks to enclose “national foreigners” to position the region in the European=Christian=white=human space [10]. Hence, Roma began to face yet another state-sponsored action in the service of whiteness. Under the guise of the epidemiological crisis, ad hoc lockdowns were not aimed at protecting Roma communities from the SARS-CoV-2 virus but rather instrumental to controlling and subjugating a whole (non-white) population.
Bulgaria’s archipelago of domestic colonies, to borrow Barbara Erneil’s notion [11], was aimed at protecting Bulgarians’ “gajdo supremacy” [12] in a time of crisis. “Crisis” here does not refer to the Covid-19 pandemic. Rather, it draws on the Greek etymological term krísis, from “krínein” – namely, to separate or to discern, to underline the root of a ‘caesura’ [13] between the core Bulgarian (white) society and its “domestic rest”. As Rexhepi would argue, this caesura was imposed by enclosing an already racialised segment of the Bulgarian society from its core, thereby changing and transforming their spatial relations [14]. It was also a caesura that set up “zones of non-being” [15] around which surveillance rendered Roma’s space lifeless and reordered their everyday conditions [16]. That white-enclosing of Roma rural and urban areas echoes Frantz Fanon’s crude distinction between the colonial and the colonised zone over the former French colonies. Both areas were opposed to each other based on the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. In it, people’s movements were strictly controlled and impossible toward the former zone. Fanon’s further description of the colonised zone is striking compared to the surveillance and living conditions in Roma neighbourhoods and villages.
“It is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters not where, or how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on the top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of other […] it is a town of n*ggers and dirty Arabs” [17]
Although scholars have traditionally foreclosed the tandem of race and whiteness by favouring the paradigm of ethnicity, the above debunks the myth of racelessness and the perpetuation of colour blindness in both historiography and politics of the typically minoritized communities in the Balkans. A potential denial unravels a form of white (gajdo) supremacy, asserting the existence of racialised hierarchies in the region [18].
Bulgaria historically belays the entangled realities of global coloniality. The troubling legacies of the post-Ottoman and socialist “politics of care” toward minority groups have never really ceased to operate across time and space. Still, ideological continuities accompany a politics of care through rescuing, helping, and uplifting. The latter term resonates particularly with Bulgaria’s history of racialised and subaltern communities. Roma, along with ethnic Turks and Muslims, not only suffered from a series of birth control and abortion policies, selective breeding, sterilization, and other eugenicist technologies. Nor were they simply dehumanised, but rather forced to return to their pristine ancestry by being liberated from the inhuman conditions prescribed by the former Ottoman colonisers. Bulgarian state’s politics of cultural uplifting (културно издигане) took place through forced Bulgarisation [19], which resonates with Frantz Fanon’s explanation of the brutal face of colonisation as a form of saving [20]. Even during communism, the rights and movement of non-Bulgarian communities were violently suspended in a way that could diminish threats to the safety of the “host society” [21] and racially enhance the ruling ethnic majority [22].
After 1989, minority members were supposed to get the most benefits from democratisation. In contrast, they were found navigating between two mutual spaces of struggle: on the one hand, they were supposed to take care of themselves by seeking recognition in the democratic arena. On the other hand, multicultural campaigns for the protection and recognition of minority cultural rights have paradoxically posited Roma as Europe’s internal, oriental, and exotic other [23]. Against this backdrop, the rhetoric of “helping” Roma remains nonetheless imbricated with a certain ideology of colonial care supported by “privileged helpers” toward some post-socialist subjects to be cured [24]. Such “caring arrangements” reveal attempts at pharmacologisation [25] that Roma groups have been constantly subjected to.
Likening ad hoc curfews for Roma quarters during the first Covid-19 to whiteness and coloniality is not simply an academic exercise to produce critical knowledge in the field of post-/de-colonial studies. It is first and foremost the reveal of an ideology of care [26] in the service of whiteness orchestrated by national authorities and repeatedly justified by the phenomenon of “de-Bulgarianisation” [27]. At times, although it makes use of a language of care, this ideology does not bear upon the (pre)socialist politics of uplifting and curing, but it directly calls for violence and extermination.
In 2011, the implication of a Roma crime boss in the murder of a Bulgarian man brought the crowds of protesters to chant “Turn Gypsies into soap”, clearly referring to the Nazi practice during the Holocaust [28]. In 2017, after an incident in Asenovgrad, Angel Dzhambazki, a member of the far-right party “Bulgarian National Movement – IMRO”, called for euthanizing those Roma locals arrested by the police. In 2019, the then-Minister of Defence, Krasimir Karakachanov, another member of IMRO, called for Roma “ghettos” to be locked down. He labelled the latter as nests of contagion due to poor living conditions and low levels of hygiene [29]. That request had a precedent: IMRO had campaigned to adopt the proposal “Concept of Changes to the Integration Policy of Gypsy (Roma) members of the Republic of Bulgaria and the Implementation Measures.” The text proposed the destruction of Roma houses as well as the implementation of penal labour for the “unsocialized” and the restriction of social benefits. That text also included birth control policies for young Roma women [30] and free-of-charge sterilization. In the spring of 2020, the police had sealed off the Roma-majority areas of Loznitsa in Asenovgrad, Southern Bulgaria, after some brawls broke out. While the local authorities had decided to conduct background checks by installing security cameras and demolishing Roma houses, local far-right groupuscules quickly incited the locals against the Roma community [31].
Bulgaria’s bio-political population management remains instructive to showcase the embeddedness of the policies of white-enclosing with the diversely universal conditions of discrimination, scapegoating, and racism. Race is undoubtedly central to charting out the genealogical lines of past and present violence against Roma and other minority groups in Bulgaria. It is not surprising that, exactly during the first shock of the pandemic, Roma’s choice to take to the streets in solidarity with the BLM after the killing of George Floyd paved the way to speak up against Bulgaria’s systematic racism and its globally known manifestations. It is not surprising either that the reactions of many Bulgarians, here understood as Christian white citizens, was to discharge such connection and depict it as an action of wokeism or “foreign propaganda”. Far-right supporters and racists went rhetorically further, arguing that only “White Lives Matter!!!”.
In retrospect, the sealed-off neighbourhoods of Roma in Bulgaria were only some of the geo-racial archipelago of domestic colonies surrounded by an ocean of racism. Among others, the conditions of the “jungle camps” alongside the EU-Croatian/non-EU Balkan borders have not changed since 2015. Refugees attempt to breach the large fences to get into Europe and eventually avoid death. Just as “the Turks”, “the terrorists”, or simply “the others” used to run out of war-torn Yugoslavia to rescue themselves from the genocidal desire to cleanse the would-be (white) nations, so today most refugees are pushed back by the police from one gate to another.
In Bulgaria, recent public policies undertaken within Roma quarters are specifically meant to lower political participation and disempower their leadership at all levels. [32] Similarly, other “animals”, “illiterate”, “bastardised others” or “terrorists” are at their gravest time of need – be they Ukrainians fighting Russia’s imperialism, Palestinian civilians resisting illegal occupation, the Kurds fighting Islamist forces and great powers rhetorically seeking progressiveness and peace in the Middle East, the Armenians enduring genocide from Anatolia and Karabakh in 1915 and 2020, the Uyghurs and indigenous people pushed away from their native lands, or the countless number of refugees and paperless people living on the margins of the Western cities. What gnawed at them is not simply their shared history of genocidal violence and marginalisation but also their “status of recipients” of gestures of care that earn them other subtler forms of systemic racism and epistemic violence.
Notes
[1] Platt, Lucinda (2021): Why ethnic minorities are bearing the brunt of COVID-19, LSE Blog, available at: https://www.lse.ac.uk/research/research-for-the-world/race-equity/why-ethnic-minorities-are-bearing-the-brunt-of-covid-19.
[2] Coronavirus Pandemic in the EU: Impact on Roma and Travellers. Luxembourg: European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights: August 2020. Accessible at https://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2020/covid19-rights-impact-september-1.
[3] Trupia, Francesco (2021) “Debunking ‘the Great Equalizer’ Discourse. Minority Perspectives from Bulgaria and Kosovo during the First Shockwave of Covid-19 Pandemic“, in: Teorija in Praksa – Interdisciplinary Journal of Social Science, Vol. 58, pp. 616–631.
[4] Maeva, Mila, Erolova, Yelis (2023): Bulgarian Roma at the Dawn of the COVID-19 Pandemic, in: Social Sciences, MDPI, Vol. 12 (4), pp.1–18.
[5] Krasimirov, Angel (2020): Fans break distancing rules at Bulgarian Cup final, available at https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-soccer-bulgaria/fans-break-distancing-rules-at-bulgarian-cup-final-idUKKBN24278D.
[6] Korunovska, N. & Jovanovic, Z. (2020): Roma in the Covid-19 Crisis. An Early Warning from Six EU Member States, Open Society Foundations.
[7] Rangachev, Antoni, Marinov, Georgi, Mladenov, Maldenov (2022): The Demographic and Geographic Impact of the COVID Pandemic in Bulgaria and Eastern Europe in 2020, available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-09790-w#citeas.
[8] Georgieva, Vanina (2022): Media Framing of the Roma Ethnic Minority in Bulgaria during the Covid-19 crisis, Master Thesis (Supervisor Yonhyok Choe) Linnaeus University, Sweden.
[9] See Rexhepi, Piro (2023): White Enclosures. Racial Capitalism and Coloniality along the Balkan Route, New York: Duke University Press.
[10] See Bonnett, Alastair (1998): “Who Was White? The Disappearance of Non-European White Identities and the Formation of European Racial Whiteness.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21 (6), pp. 1029–1055.
[11] See Erneil, Barbara (2017): Domestic Colonies. The Turn Inward to Colony. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[12] Jelena Savic coined the term “Gajdo supremacy” from a critical Romani perspective. The term refers to the privileged position of non-Roma people, who benefit, like those with white privileges, from special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks. See: Jelena Savic (2022): Gadjo privileges, available at: https://www.academia.edu/82635893/Gadjo_privileges.
[13] Marramao, Giacomo (2012): The Passage West. Philosophy after the Nation State, New York: Verso, p. 115.
[14] Genova, Neda (2023): Racism, Islamophobia and Decoloniality on the Balkans. Interview with Piro Rexhepi, Dversia, available at: https://dversia.net/7684/racism-islamophobia-decoloniality-interview-w-piro-rexhepi/.
[15] Fanon, Frantz (2011): The Wretched of the Earth, London: Penguin Book, pp. 37–41.
[16] Medeleanu, Luiza (2023): The Eternal Migrant? Roma Belonging in Europe, Green European Journal, available at https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/the-eternal-migrant-roma-belonging-in-europe/.
[17] Fanon (2011): The Wretched of the Earth, p. 39.
[18] Resnick, Elana, Rucker-Chang, Sunnie, West Ohueri, Chelsi (2021): “Revisiting the “Countors of Race, Racialisation and Race-Making” in Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, June 2021, available at: https://www.aseees.org/news-events/aseees-blog-feed/revisiting-%E2%80%9Ccontours-race-racialization-and-race-making%E2%80%9D-slavic-east.
[19] In literature, “Bulgarisation” takes usually the name of “Revival Process” (Възродителен процес) – an euphemism to refer to the decades-long policy of assimilation that brought Muslims, Turks, Roma, and other smaller communities to convert to Christianity, to give up on their original Arabic-sounding or Muslim names to accept new Bulgarian-Slavonic ones, to be expelled or voluntarily leave their homeland. See Trupia, Francesco (2023): Between Resistance and State Violence: The Co-Beloning and Non-Exclusivity of Pomak Heritage, in: The Heritage of Central-East Europe, Kinga Anna Gajda (Ed.) Berlin: Peter Lang, pp. 159–177; and Trupia, Francesco (2021): Decolonising Bulgaria’s Official Amnesia of the Communist Past: A Pericentric Approach to Minority Memories of Anti-Communist Resistance, in: Memory Cultures in Southeast Europe since 1945, Christian Voß, Katerina Kralova, Sabina Ferhadbegović (eds.), Berlin: Südosteuropa-Jahrbuch, pp. 169–186.
[20] Fanon (2011): The Wretched of the Earth, p. 142.
[21] Mbembe, Achille (2019): Necropolitics, New York: Duke University Press, p. 35.
[22] Bjelić, Dušan (2018): Toward a Genealogy of the Balkan Discourses on Race, in: “Interventions International Journal of Postcolonial Studies”, Vol. 20, Issue 6, p. 918.
[23] Kóczé, Angéla, and Bakos, Petra (2021): “We need to learn about each other and unlearn patterns of racism”, in: Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues. Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice, Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert (Eds.), London: Routledge, p. 211.
[24] Kolářová, Kateřina and Koobak, Redi (2021): Cripping postsocialist Chronicity, in: Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues. Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice, Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert (Eds.), London: Routledge, pp. 217–218.
[25] Pharmacologisation was a term used by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze in his critical studies of race and practices of racial medication in critical theory. In his view, pharmacologisation usually presupposes an underlying knowledge of a biological or psychological condition subjected to medication, which takes the shape of a race-based temporary measure almost similar to a medical prescription. See more: Eze, Chukwudi Emmanuel (2008): On Reason. Rationality in a World of Cultural Conflict and Racism, Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 161–178.
[26] See Clare, Eli: “Ideology of Cure”. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2017, pp. 3–18.
[27] By “de-Bulgarianization”, it is referred to Bulgaria’s state of alarm caused by the rising birth rate of Muslims, Roma, and Turks over the ethnically white Bulgarian population, which is in steep decline. See Hruby, Denise (2019): How to slow down the world’s fastest-shrinking country, BBC, available at: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190913-how-to-slow-down-the-worlds-fastest-shrinking-country.
[28] Shyrokonis, Yuliya (2020): EU citizenship, but no shoes: the Roma of Bulgaria, OpenDemocracy, available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/eu-citizenship-no-shoes-roma-bulgaria/.
[29] Coronavirus Pandemic in the EU: Impact on Roma and Travellers. Luxembourg: European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 27. August 2020, available at https://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2020/covid19-rights-impact-september-1.
[30] Bulgaria’s deputy PM proposes free abortions for Roma women to control birth rate, Daily Shaba, 2019, available at https://www.dailysabah.com/europe/2019/02/08/bulgarias-deputy-pm-proposes-free-abortions-for-roma-women-to-control-birth-rate.
[31] Rexhepi, Piro (2023) White Enclosures. Racial Capitalism and Coloniality along the Balkan Route, New York: Duke University Press, 1.
[32] See Mishev, Mihail (2023) Къде е бъдещето на ромското движение? [Where is the future of Roma Movement] dВЕРСИЯ, available at: https://dversia.net/7549/romsko-dvizhenie/?fbclid=IwAR1aKwQriqD6ud6mlgswvha5ha-ojxrET5dOcP6ZddUHe6sCsi0mK7pdyrQ; and Fileva, Lora (2023): Активността в ромските секции не донесе на никоя партия силен резултат. [The participation in the Roma polling stations did not bring any party a strong result], accessible at: https://www.dnevnik.bg/izbori-2023/2023/04/04/4468216_aktivnostta_v_romskite_sekcii_ne_donese_na_nikoia.
About the Author
Francesco Trupia is a Research Adjunct at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, leading the project “Civic Responses and Cultural Identity Dilemmas of the Second Generation of Balkan Muslims in Time of Illiberal Democracy”, supported by the National Science Centre in Krakow (Poland). His research interests focus on identity politics, minority inclusion, and civil society in Southeast Europe and the Caucasus. He has completed internships and postdoctoral research at the University of Warsaw, the University of Antwerp, and Humboldt University. With a PhD in Political Philosophy from Sofia University, he has worked as a Policy Analyst, volunteeed with vulnerable groups and did mentoring for the Polonium Foundation.
Citation: Francesco Trupia, Policying the Roma in the Service of Whiteness. Post-Pandemic Reflections from Bulgaria, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 27.02.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/55511
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Forum Transregionale Studien (February 25, 2025). Policing the Roma in the Service of Whiteness. Post-Pandemic Reflections from Bulgaria. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved April 21, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13d90
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