Victimizing the Roma again

IN NOVEMBER 2007, the Czech Republic was found by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to have discriminated against Roma children by assigning them routinely to schools for pupils with learning difficulties.

The ruling came more than 10 years after the case had been launched. The children had had to exhaust Czech legal procedures before having recourse to the Strasbourg court.

The ECHR noted that the treatment of the Roma had not been contrary to Czech law. It observed that "the channeling of Roma children to special schools for the mentally retarded was often quasi-automatic." More than half of the Roma in Ostrava were being consigned to the special schools...

THE same contemptuous, racist attitude to the Roma persists in parts of Europe....

A news picture last year showed the bodies of cousins Christina, 12, and Viola, 11, Ibramovitc, on a beach near Naples, as sunbathers in fashionable swimwear lathered themselves with oil just 10 meters away. The children had been begging on the beach, then ran into the sea in high spirits and had been swamped by a wave. The UN High Commission for Refugees commented that: "Even in death there seemed to be a total indifference to these children."

In a passionate article in the Daily Mail, journalist Sue Reid described the scene as "chilling evidence of how Italy's crackdown on the Roma has sick echoes of the country's fascist past." Mussolini had publicly described the Roma as "sub-human."

The Berlusconi Government has passed a law which nobody denies is aimed at the Roma laying down six-year prison sentences for immigrants who lie about their ethnicity or country of origin.

http://socialistworker.org/2009/07/06/victimizing-the-roma-again

has been going on for hundreds of years during the Holocaust the Nazi's came closer to complete and total genocide of the entire Roma/Sinti people than perhaps any other almost other group, yet no one seems to pay much attention.