WORLD ROMA DAY

„In the Third Reich we Jews were considered to be sub-humans. The gypsies are today not openly called sub-humans, but are felt to be such and are treated as such.”

Ernst Tugendhat, philosopher and member of the Advisory Committee of the GfbV

On the occasion of the World Roma Day* on 8th April the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) draws attention to the fact that the ten to twelve million Roma in Europe have for the most part to live in bitter poverty. „The number of members of this „nation” is larger than the total population in 14 EU states and their situation is very much the same as that of the suppressed and discriminated Afro-Americans in the USA in the 60s”, said the GfbV Chair, Tilman Zülch, on Tuesday in Göttingen. The Roma could really do with a Martin Luther King and then a Barack Obama from among themselves.

Infant mortality is in this ethnic group twice as high as in the rest of the population and their expectation of life lies ten to fifteen years below the average of the various national populations. The children of the Roma are often automatically sent to different schools or to special schools. Many of their often illegal settlements above all in Eastern Europe lack running water, drainage, electricity and gas.

There is hardly a country in which Roma, Sinti, gitanos, gypsies, tinkers or Jenish people and others are not suppressed or discriminated. Sometimes members of their ethnic groups are victims of severe violations of human rights. In the Czech Republic about one thousand Roma women have according to various estimates from the 1960s up to the present day been compulsorily sterilised without their consent. Human rights and Roma activists, among them the women’s group „Vzajemne Souziti”, have so far without any success fought for the recognition of these crimes, for an official apology and financial compensation.

2000 Roma from Kosovo have to the present day been refused refugee status in Macedonia. Slovenia, the successor to Yugoslavia, refuses citizenship to about 4,000 Roma from ex-Yugoslavia. About half a million Roma have been refused citizenship in Rumania. In Italy the Berlusconi government has together with large sections of the media carried out an anti-Roma hate campaign and accused wholesale this disadvantaged minority of criminality. A survey conducted among 36,000 Roma in Serbia showed that half of them had no identity papers, no access to government benefits and did not live in settlements approved by the government.

„We are particularly disturbed by the indifference of the Europeans to the fate of this minority, which is persecuted on racial grounds”, criticised Zülch. The human rights expert recalled in this connection that Sinti and Roma had lost approximately 500,000 persons to the Holocaust. The fact that this gives rise to a particular responsibility for the survivors is often forgotten. So when 120,000 Roma were driven out of Kosovo by Albanian extremists after the Nato intervention of 1999 no one came running to their aid. 75 of their villages went up in flames. The GfbV appeals to Germany, also as a consequence of the Holocaust, to grant the 30,000 Roma refugees from Kosovo a long-term stay in our country.

* This European minority celebrates on 8th April 2009 the 38th World Roma Day, which was established at the first International Congress of the Sinti and Roma in 1971 in London.