The Associated Press: Europe's Roma say woes deepen amid economic crisis

13:18 El NACHO 0 Comments

The Associated Press: Europe's Roma say woes deepen amid economic crisis: "Europe's estimated 12 million Gypsies, daily life is getting even worse and tens of thousands of children face shocking discrimination by authorities who shunt them off into schools for the mentally disabled, activists said Friday.
At a two-day conference in Spain on the plight of Gypsies, also called Roma, EU officials pledged in a final statement to keep working to integrate Roma and make sure aid funds reach them effectively.
The conference took place during a week when 17 people were detained in Romania on suspicion of trafficking nearly 170 Roma children to Britain for begging and stealing, and an anti-Gypsy party in Hungary was poised to make major gains in elections Sunday.
One of the participants in the Spain conference, Violeta Naydenova, knows all about the challenges children face.
Growing up in a Gypsy settlement with open sewers in Bulgaria, Naydenova was supposed to go to a segregated school for Roma children.
But because of her daughter's fair skin, Naydenova's mother managed to sneak her and her brother into a regular Bulgarian school as a possible ticket out of the grinding poverty and discrimination affecting Europe's largest ethnic minority.
In the end, Naydenova's story is one of triumph: she went on to earn a journalism degree and work for a foundation run by philanthropist George Soros, helping young Roma.
Naydenova, however, is one of the lucky ones because many activists say the situation for Gypsies is getting worse. The reasons, they say, include inertia and institutionalized racism against these nomadic, generally dark-skinned people who trace their roots to India and are often associated with petty crime and begging."