Roma Leader Calls on EU to Outlaw Racism Against Gypsies Alongside Antisemitism
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by Algemeiner Staff
German Roma community leader Romani Rose. Photo: Reuters/Christian Ditsch
The head of the Romani community in Germany has called on the European Union to outlaw racism against gypsies — known as “antiziganism” — alongside antisemitism in a statement marking European Holocaust Remembrance Day for Sinti and Roma, which falls on Thursday.
Romani Rose — chair of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma — asserted that right-wing extremism “is again expressing itself through violence against Sinti and Roma, against Jews and other minorities.”
Rose added that the aim of the EU should be “to outlaw antiziganism just as much as antisemitism.”
Rose praised the final report of the “Independent Commission on Antiziganism,” which was recently presented to the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament. The report called for the establishment of a nationwide monitoring center to track attacks on Roma as well as the appointment of a federal commissioner to tackle the prejudice. In May 2018, the government appointed Felix Klein as its first commissioner to tackle rising antisemitism.
Deemed by Nazis to be, like Jews, “racially inferior,” the Roma suffered from extensive persecution and then genocide under Hitler’s regime.
According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazi authorities “subjected Roma to arbitrary internment, sterilization, forced labor in concentration camps, deportation, and mass murder.” The Nazis murdered tens of thousands of Roma in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union and Serbia and thousands more in the killing centers at Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibor and several other concentration camps.
While the pre-World War II Roma population stood between 1.5 and 2 million, the exact number of Roma victims of the Nazis has not been established. According to the USHMM, “on the basis of the evidence available to date, historians estimate that the Germans and their allies killed at least 250,000 European Roma during World War II. Some scholars estimate that the full death toll may well reach around 500,000.”
