Three generations after the Holocaust, Europe must widen its fight against ethnic-based violence to protect the Roma people, who like the Jews were mass-murdered by the Nazis, a Roma leader said on Thursday.
Speaking at the commemorations marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Romani Rose said Romas want equal treatment in fighting discrimination.
"In the international arena, threats resulting from increasing anti-Semitism are rightly exposed," said Rose, chairman of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma.
"However, the alarmingly growing violence on racist grounds against the Sinti and Roma, Europe's largest minority, fails to attract much needed attention of the political circles and public opinion."
Up to half a million of Roma were among the estimated 11.5 million killed during the Holocaust, including nearly 6 million Jews.
Some 10 to 12 million Roma now live in Europe, many of whom live in squalid conditions isolated from the rest of society with little access to education, jobs and basic services.
The Roma community migrated from northern India to Europe around 1,000 years ago. They face staggering problems that activists say stem from institutional racism on a grand scale.
In countries such as Italy and Greece, hundreds of thousands live in camps that are often walled and guarded.
Most Roma children in the Czech Republic go to schools for the mentally handicapped. Across Europe, Roma say they are attacked by whites and beaten by police and that often their cries for help go unheeded by authorities.
Rose called on Europeans to embrace their Roma national minorities as part of their societies and common history so that another Auschwitz, a place where 1.5 million people -- 90 percent of them Jews -- were murdered.
"That is why I would like to call in this place upon government representatives to take a stance, with equal determination, against racism aimed at the Sinti and Roma.
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