New deportations to Kosovo and Serbia might mean death by freezing for impoverished and traumatized Romani refugees.

"It is time that reparations become more than just a rhetoric issue. Romani families, children, women and men who have been living with us for many years should no longer be deported to uncertainty and certainly not in the icy cold," said Tilman Zülch, General Secretary of the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP), today. "Politicians who act like this haven't learnt anything from the past. It is a crime!"

At present, there are recurring reports about Romani people being deported from Germany, causing fear and desperation among the victims. On Tuesday morning, another long-established Romani family from Germany is to be deported from Düsseldorf into nowhere.

This winter, eastern Europe is completely covered in snow and hundreds of people have already frozen to death. Yesterday, eight people were killed by an avalanche in Kosovo. There are up to three meters of snow and the temperatures in the Balkan area fall as low as -20 °C. The majority of the Romani people live in makeshift shacks made of wood or plastic parts or in barracks, mostly without any insulation against the cold. Many do not have water connections. In many regions of the former southern Yugoslavia, water pipes have burst so that there is no running water. For most people there, it is unaffordable to buy drinking water in a supermarket.

"If the federal and stately interior ministers, prime ministers, provincial governments and parliamentary parties choose to expel Romani families – the poorest of the poor in south-eastern Europe – under these circumstances, they are deporting them," said Zülch.

"In January 1945, we were millions of people being evicted, traveling on foot or by horse-drawn carriages," said Zülch. "Hundreds of thousands, mostly young children, the elderly, the sick and the wounded paid with their lives. The new deportations of Romani people reminds us of the way the Gypsies were deported by the Nazis, killing 500,000 members of this population group."