Hindus, Jews Ask Pope to Abandon Double Standards on Roma Apartheid

Hindus and Jews claim that Pope Benedict holds double standards on the issues of Roma (Gypsy) apartheid in Europe.

Hindu statesman Rajan Zed; and Rabbi Jonathan B. Freirich, prominent Jewish leader in Nevada and California in USA; in a statement in Nevada today, said that despite their repeated requests, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI had not come out openly to support the 15-million European Roma who faced apartheid conditions. But in a message for "19th World Day of the Sick, 2011", posted on Holy See's website on January 15, Pope says (as per Zenit.org translation): "...know how to recognize and serve him also in those brothers who are poor, sick, suffering and in difficulty, who have need of your help".

The Pope also points out in this message: "A society unable to accept its suffering members and incapable of helping to share their suffering and to bear it inwardly through 'com-passion' is a cruel and inhuman society". And he quotes in this message: "As I have loved you, so must you love one another" (John 13:34).

Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, and Rabbi Freirich argued that it was a travesty to silently watch Roma suffer day after day for the last about 1200 years, and do nothing about it. Roma apartheid occurred right under the Pope's nose in Europe. Hindus and Jews had been regularly appealing to the Pope to openly support the Roma cause and come up with a White Paper on their plight, and yet the Pope continued to ignore these reasonable requests for justice in Europe for the Roma.

Rajan Zed and Rabbi Jonathan Freirich further said that the alarming condition of the Roma people was a social blight for Europe and the rest of the world as they reportedly regularly faced social exclusion, racism, substandard education, hostility, joblessness, rampant illness, inadequate housing, lower life expectancy, unrest, living on desperate margins, language barriers, stereotypes, mistrust, rights violations, discrimination, marginalization, appalling living conditions, prejudice, human rights abuse, and racist slogans on Internet.

The Pope needed to make a public statement against persecution of the Roma, Zed and Freirich added.

Rajan Zed and Rabbi Freirich pointed out that religions shared a conviction to help the helpless, defenseless and downtrodden. The Pope should recognize, acknowledge and affirm the Roma as children of God who deserved to be treated like all other people-as equals. Roma apartheid was shocking, reprehensible, hazardous and immoral. As the most powerful religious leader in the world, the Pope's must lead in upholding the moral obligation to make efforts to stop the frequent human rights violations suffered by Roma.

Hindu Rajan Zed and Jewish Jonathan Freirich offered help to the Pope, if asked, to support the Roma cause.

Sify News

Thanks to NewsHound for the heads-up

Dark family secrets of BNP leader Griffin

BNP leader Nick Griffin, who last week branded gypsies “anti social and criminal”, can trace his roots to travellers hawking cheap goods from a horse and cart.

The controversial MEP’s great-grandfather George Griffin roamed from town to town in a horse-drawn caravan with his wife Esther and their children, selling china and crockery. Census reports show he spent years living the gypsy life, never settling in one place because as an impoverished traveller he was on the margins of society and never fully accepted anywhere.

Last week Griffin, 50, who condemned attacks on Romanian gypsies in Northern Ireland, said: “We have to bear in mind that the gypsy community is notorious for its extremely high rate of criminality and antisocial behaviour. Everyone in Romania and eastern Europe knows this and it is one reason why their governments are so keen to encourage them to come over here.”

Yet between 1868 and 1874 records show his great-grandfather represented just such a minority. He travelled in one caravan with his family while his business partner, Mary Ann Hollis, travelled in another.

George habitually lied about his age, describing himself as 25 in the 1871 Census, 41 a decade later, 47 in the 1891 Census and 58 in 1901. He plied his precarious trade in Devon and Cornwall and could often be found parked outside the London Inn pub in Liskeard. The 1871 Census shows the caravans were parked next to the Cornish pub, noting: “Six persons not in houses”. In the column marked “Houses” it reports them as living in vans.

While George lived with Esther, 22, and his 10-month-old son George Junior in one, Mary Ann Hollis, 37, was in the second with George’s three-year-old daughter Mary Ann Griffi n and a William Huxham, 16.

He is described as a servant but probably earned his keep selling wares. In the Census column marked “Rank, profession or occupation” George is a “licensed hawker dealing in china and crockery ware”. His lifestyle would not have fitted with the intolerant views of Mr Griffin and the British National Party which does not accept black people as members. Griffin has called for an immediate halt to immigration, and voluntary resettlement of immigrants legally living in Britain.

When told this week of Mr Griffin’s heritage, shocked BNP deputy leader Simon Darby said: “That will please him.”

Genealogy expert Nick Barratt added: “George Griffin travelled around, scratching a living. His group will have roamed from street to street like ragtag travellers trying to survive on their wits and selling their wares. And it is highly likely he spent many more years living the life of a traveller before he married. Today we would call his group travellers and just like today they would have been marginalised on the edge of society and seen as outsiders. They will have been treated with a degree of suspicion and as a minority.”

Sunday Express

Romanian actress battles racism in Italy

Emigrant heads 'charm offensive' to counter anti-Romanian feeling

As Italy struggles to contain a rising tide of xenophobia and racism, the largest and most despised minority in the country has acquired a glamorous standard-bearer. Like 1.2 million other residents of Italy, Ramona Badescu is an immigrant from Romania. The willowy actress and singer from Bucharest moved to Italy after the fall of the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989 and is the closest thing Italy possesses to a Romanian household name.

Now Rome's mayor, Gianni Alemanno, has made her his counsellor for the Romanian community's integration. "I hope to become a bridge between the Romanians and the mayor," she said. "Romanians here have many problems connected to work: more Romanians die at work sites than any other nationality." Her first policy idea is to set up a free phone service in both languages to help Romanian migrants find information, residence permits and other practical information.

But some Italians have greeted the appointment with derision. "What does this bird know about what the Romanians in Italy get up to?" was one web comment. "She's one of the privileged, she knows nothing about reality..."

"It's scandalous to give this job to a 'lady' who has no qualifications for the job..." wrote another ."Another nobody who has failed in showbiz and throws herself into politics," sneered a third. "It makes me sick!"

Ms Badescu, who has a degree in commerce and economics, insists she is the right person for the job. "I'm an emigrant and emigration is never a happy act. It's full of problems: you leave your family behind. You are hoping and dreaming of a better life, but when you arrive it's very different from what you imagined."

Italy's attitude to immigrants was turned upside down last year after an admiral's wife was murdered. A Romanian gypsy was quickly blamed and, amid a media witch-hunt, politicians demanded the mass expulsion without trial of undesirable foreigners. Romanians were the scapegoat of choice: Walter Veltroni, Mr Alemanno's left-wing predecessor, said Italy had become "unlivable" since January 2007, when Romania entered the European Union.

With a growing number of crimes blamed on Romanians, Italians began to fear and suspect these hidden strangers in their midst. Clinching the prejudice was the belief that romeni (Romanians) and rom (Roma, gypsies) were one and the same. It has become an urban legend that all Roma are Romanians and vice-versa.

"The Romanians and the Roma are two completely different peoples," Ms Badescu points out. "The crime reports have created this prejudice against an entire people. Now there are Romanians in Italy who are scared to speak their own language."

Independent

Plight of the Roma: echoes of Mussolini

The compulsory fingerprinting of Italy's Gypsy population is the latest example of the country's increasingly repressive attitude towards minorities – and an ominous reminder of the policies of the former Fascist dictator.

Fingerprint the lot of them: the idea had the satisfying smack of firm government. Now the Italian government was doing something tough; something long overdue.

The Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, a leader of the rabble-rousing Northern League – close allies of Silvio Berlusconi on the government benches – has explained his next step in his assault on the "emergenza di sicurezza", the "security emergency": fingerprinting all Gypsies.

It was the only way, he told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday, for Italy to guarantee "to those who have the right to remain here, the possibility of living in decent conditions." For this purpose the Roma – those with Italian nationality and those without, EU citizens and those from outside the Community – will all have their fingerprints taken. And the rule will even apply to Gypsy children – for reasons that to many of Mr Maroni's supporters must have sounded obvious: "to avoid phenomena," as he put it, "such as begging". The new measures, he said, were indispensable "in order to expel those who do not have the right to stay in Italy".

For anybody not swept up in the wave of anti-Roma fury, the campaign has a strong whiff of Mussolini and Hitler about it.

The task of counting and identifying the residents of Italy, citizens or otherwise, who happen to belong the most despised minority in Europe is, in fact, already under way.

Giovanna Boursier, an Italian journalist, found one small camp where the count had already taken place on the furthest southern outskirts of Milan. "There is not even a bar where one could ask the way," she wrote in Il Manifesto, "but once you scramble up a hill you see the roofs of the huts. There are about 10 of them, along with the caravans, dotted around the outskirts, under flyovers and high-tension wires. Around 40 Roma lived here."

They told her that the police arrived at dawn, woke everybody up, surrounded the camp and flooded it with lights and then went from home to home, demanding identity documents and photographing them. All the residents were Italian citizens. It made no difference. "This wasn't a census," protested a Roma called Giorgio. "This was an ethnic register."

Fingerprinting was the detail they omitted – lacking, at that point, the power to do it. But Mr Maroni has now set about remedying that.

Italy's "security emergency" is a strange and distracting phenomenon which has been brewing up slowly for the past decade as economic growth slowed to a stop. It intensified dramatically with the admission of Romania and Bulgaria to the EU in January of last year, and now bulks so large that it was the biggest factor in Mr Berlusconi's election victory and continues to dominate the media. It led to the decision last week to allow police numbers in the big cities to be augmented by up to 3,000 troops.

The issue is strange and distracting because it does not seem to exist, either statistically or as a fact of personal experience. Crime is not a big deal in Italian cities. There is no epidemic of burglary, mugging, bag-snatching, rape. Italy remains a country where it is pretty safe to walk the streets. Yet the government is behaving as if this were Colombia. And Colombia with a very special difference: that the supposedly soaring rate of crime is the work of one particular ethnic group, known as "nomadi rom."

Gypsies or Roma are visible in Italian cities as in the rest of Europe, and their number has increased. In Rome your subway journey may be made slightly less enjoyable by their accordions and violins and the appeals of their begging. Your eyes may be offended by the sight of them fishing in the waste bins, or hauling stuff home for recycling. Rome is so badly policed that small, utterly miserable squatter camps have sprung up in many places. They are a disgrace – unhygienic, unaesthetic – and have no place in a civilised modern country. But as the source of a "security emergency"?

Giovanni Maria Bellu, a La Repubblica journalist and an expert on Italy's minorities, said the problem was one of misunderstanding. "Most Italians make no distinction between Italian Roma and those who arrived from Yugoslavia during that country's break-up," he said. "And many Italians think that 'Rom' is an abbreviation of 'Romanian' – and since the arrival of Romania in the EU there has been a large influx of Romanians. People conflate these separate things. There have been crimes committed by Romanians – and people confuse these with the Rom, and the Rom end up being blamed for everything.

"Security was the over-riding theme of the general election, which is why this conflated Roma-Romanian theme became so big, and a part of the left is very timid about confronting the problem. The security emergency itself is a myth: there has been no increase in the number of rapes, for example – in fact, the number has declined. But when a single case occurs it is splashed on the front page of certain papers for a double reason: it increases the climate of fear; and it damages the centre-left, which is perceived as being weak on security."

Italy's Roma paranoia spilled on to the world's front pages on 13 May, when a woman in a suburb of Naples called Ponticelli alleged that a Roma girl had tried to steal her baby. The community erupted in fury, and thugs belonging to the Camorra crime syndicates threw petrol bombs into the local gypsy squatter camp, driving out the inhabitants and burning the place to the ground. Suddenly there was no avoiding the fact: the Italian hatred for the Roma had taken a dramatic new turn.

But the origin was an ancient fear, rooted not in fact but legend. Mr Bellu said: "There is nothing in police records to support the idea that Roma have stolen babies. It's just a legend. But one that still has people in its grip."

Marco Nieli, the president of Opera Nomadi, the most important organisation representing Italy's Roma, said: "The first Roma arrived in Italy in 1400 and have been here ever since, and are Italians in every respect. The real problem is one of crass ignorance: if someone says that Roma steal babies, the political parties reflect and amplify this nonsense. This way all the problems are swept under the carpet."

Thomas Hammerberg, European commissioner for human rights, visited a big Roma camp in Rome earlier this month. "I visited Casalino 900 camp, where 650 or so Roma live," he said. "There was no electricity, no water. It was a very bad slum."

And the fear of the "ethnic register" was already rampant, he said, "due to what happened to them in the past in Germany and elsewhere. They also raised the question, why us? Why not others? Many of those in the camp I visited had been in Italy for 40 years; they came over from Yugoslavia, some of them still have problems with identity papers, squeezed between the old and the new country. If you've been in a country for 40 years, are you still a foreigner? This talk about fingerprints was another reminder that their status has never been settled.

"The basic problem of Roma is widespread in Europe: housing, health, education, employment, political representation... But for a long time in Italy the Roma have been a symbol of something that is unwanted.

"The Nazis and the Fascists used the same methods of singling them out in the 1930s. It's not surprising that they are frightened."

A pocket dictator and the Manifesto of Race

Racism is often seen as intrinsic to fascism, but the inventor of the ideology, Benito Mussolini, was brought around to the Hitler obsession with race late in his career and after a great deal of arm-twisting.

Jews had lived in Italy for centuries without persecution. The community in Rome, though confined to the historic ghetto area for many centuries, has the longest uninterrupted history of any Jewish community in the world. In Mussolini's Italy, upper middle- class Jews continued to live and prosper without persecution – until 1938.

In that year Mussolini introduced his Manifesto of Race, closely modelled on the Nazi Nuremberg laws, which stripped Jews of their Italian citizenship, the right of Jewish children to go to school and of adults to work in the government or the professions.

Traditional Italian tolerance and/or indifference towards Jews meant that many were sheltered during those years, but after the fall of Rome, when Mussolini moved to the town of Salo on Lake Garda and was set up by the Nazis as the pocket dictator of the Republic of Salo, deportations of Jews to the death camps began in earnest.

And what of Italy's Roma during the grim final years of Mussolini's rule? Some 1.6 million Roma died in Germany and elsewhere during the Holocaust, a proportionately greater genocide than that suffered by the Jews.

The history of their treatment under Mussolini is a subject that contemporary Italian historians have been loath to look into, according to Marco Nieli, president of the Italian Roma organisation Opera Nomadi.

"It's a fact that there were concentration camps for Roma in Italy during the Fascist period, and it's also a fact that thousands of Roma died in them of hunger, cold and over work," he claimed. "Studies are now under way to discover the extent of the suffering that took place."

Independent