A FORMER Yorkshire mayor faces being reported to the police over alleged racism and anti-Muslim comments on social media.
Councillor Heather Venter, who was mayor of Driffield in 2013 and 2014, supported controversial posts on Twitter, but denies harbouring racist views. One tweet she ‘liked’ said: “Shouldn’t employ Muslims. Nothing but trouble.” Another tweeted on April 30, read: “Sadly, looks like Romania’s Gypsy begger/pickpockets will b [sic] soon replaced by African Muslims.” She also tweeted a link to an article by a neo-Nazi website that read: “White South Africans march in London against white genocide.” The controversy comes after a website accused the councillor of racism for her Twitter activity.George McManus of the Beverley and Holderness Labour Party. said the tweets ‘liked’ by Coun Venter were “designed to cause offence”. He added: “There’s no room for remarks like these in a civilised society. I am particularly concerned that this person occupies a position of authority as a councillor and that this impacts badly on the reputation of the good people of Driffield. They are in my opinion designed to cause offence and to cause racial and religious hatred. Continue reading Ex-Yorkshire mayor in racism storm over anti-Muslim and ‘Romania gypsy’ tweets
Category Archives: Posts in English
A Hungarian newspaper compares the Roma with animal
Because of an offense towards the Romas in an Hungarian daily newspaper „Magyar hirlap„ , paid a fine of 850 Euros. The author of the column, otherwise one of the founders of the Governing Party Fides, in the text uses hate speech, announced the Hungarian council. The journalist and friend of the Hungarian prime minister compared the Roma with animals. The fine of 850 Euros is given because the author of the column Zolt Bajer broke the journalist rules. He wrote an article at a celebration in a bar, where he had a conflict, the individual attackers were identified as Roma, and Bajer wrote „The Roma are like animals and they act as if they were animals„. „A large number of Roma are not able to coexist. They are not able to live among people„ wrote Bajer which is close with conservative Government. Bajer was giving similar comments about the Romani community, and that is why the newspaper Magyar hirlap was criticized many times.
Source: Roma Times
Date: 07.06.2016
Demonstration in Prague calls on EU to stop subsidizing pig farm on Romani Holocaust site
Monday, 16 May was the International Day of Romani Resistance, a day to honor the memory of the Romani victims of the Holocaust and the heroic uprising of Romani people in the Auschwitz concentration camp. On that occasion the Konexe organization held a demonstration in front of the EU House, the headquarters of the representation of the European Commission and European Parliament in the Czech Republic. Representatives of Konexe delivered a message entitled „Europe, Stop Subsidizing the Pig Farm at Lety“ to the EU House. News server Romea.cz broadcast audio and video of the demonstration live online. „We have nothing against the European Union per se, we are criticizing the state of affairs in which the European Structural Funds are subsidizing a specific agricultural enterprise located on places where genocide was perpetrated. In our view, this is absolutely incompatible with European values,“ Miroslav Brož of Konexe told news server Romea.cz prior to the demonstration.
Day of Romani Resistance
The Day of Romani Resistance commemorates the events of 16 May 1944, when Romani and Sinti prisoners in the so-called „Gypsy Camp“ at Auschwitz-Birkenau rose up against their captors. On that day the camp leadership had planned to murder them all, but the Roma rose up and refused to obey the orders of the SS. This event is still absolutely unknown in the Czech Republic. News server Romea.cz published last year a study about the Romani uprising in Auschwitz written by historian Michal Schuster of the Museum of Romani Culture.
The events of 16 May 1944
The murder of everybody in the so-called „Gypsy Camp“ was supposed to be performed during the evening of 16 May 1944, when the sound of the gong announced that everyone in the entire camp was banned from leaving and that it would be closed. A truck drove up before the gates of the camp and 50-60 members of the special SS commando unit jumped out and called on the prisoners to quickly leave the housing blocks. All of the prisoners, however, refused to leave. Reportedly there was total calm in the barracks. The prisoners barricaded the doors and prepared to defend themselves however they could with rocks and work tools. Romani survivor Hugo Höllenreiner (born 1933 in Munich), who was deported to Auschwitz with his family in 1943, recalls the moments of resistance as follows: „Outside about seven or eight men came to the gate. Dad yelled at them. The entire building shook as he shouted: ‚We’re not coming out! You come in here! We’re waiting for you! If you want something, you have to come in and get it!‘ “ The SS commando was startled by this refusal to obey. Their commander decided to postpone the action. The camp closure was temporarily called off. While there was never an open clash between the Romani prisoners and the SS members, the incident played a significant role. It was definitely not the custom in the concentration camps for prisoners to resist a planned and prepared action en masse right before it was to be carried out. There is absolutely no doubt that the armed SS commando unit could have suppressed this act of resistance, but they decided not to go into an open confrontation and preferred to achieve their aims another way. This incident unequivocally had the nature of an uprising and deserves a significant place in the tragic history of the Holocaust of the European Roma. There were approximately 6 500 prisoners in the so-called „Gypsy Camp“ of Birkenau at the time. During the night of 2 August and the early morning hours of 3 August 1944, all of the camp prisoners were murdered in the gas chambers. 2 August is therefore commemorated as the European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day.
Source: Romea.cz
Date: 17.05.2016
16 May 1944: Romani Resistance Day
It seems that the denial of genocide and the denial of racism are communicating vessels. An ethnic group whose genocide is denied continues to be targeted with racism. Conversely, the recognition of genocide can start a healing process in society that can help it overcome racism. The Romani Holocaust, called the „porajmos“ (destruction) in Romanes, is a part of history that is not only forgotten today, it is even denied. We do not know much about this aspect of the Holocaust. There are just a few books about it, and very little historical research. Be that as it may, some forgotten parts of the Romani Holocaust really deserve commemoration. Romani people did not always play the role of passive victims during that era. What happened on 16 May 1944? In the extermination camp of Auschwitz II – Birkenau, section BIIe was called the „Gypsy Camp“ (Zigeuner Lager). Some of the Romani people transported into the hell of Auschwitz by the Nazis were not gassed immediately upon arrival, but were placed in the Zigeuner Lager. BIIe was a „mixed“ camp, which meant children, men and women were imprisoned there together. The Romani prisoners were forced into slave labor, observed and subjected to medical tests, and tortured. Dr Josef Mengele of the SS, a sadistic psychopath known as the „Angel of Death“, chose Romani individuals, most of them children, to subject to perverse experiments. During the night of 2 August and the early morning of 3 August 1944, all of the prisoners of the camp, without exception, were murdered in the gas chambers. Because of this known, official history, 2 August has been commemorated as Romani Holocaust Day. Continue reading 16 May 1944: Romani Resistance Day
Clashes at Anti-Roma Rally in Radnevo, Bulgaria
Several policemen and protesters have been injured during clashes at an anti-Roma rally in the southern town of Radnevo that was held after an alleged assault by Roma men on ethnic Bulgarians
Three policemen and four protesters suffered injuries after violent clashes broke out the rally in Radnevo, the Bulgarian interior ministry said on Thursday. Around 2,000 people joined the protest on Wednesday evening, following an incident in which four men of Roma origin assaulted three Bulgarians in a street row on Monday. The violence erupted when the crowd, shouting “Bulgaria for the Bulgarians”, “Bulgarians – heroes”, “Bulgaria above all” and various anti-Roma slogans, reached the Roma neighbourhood of Kantona, which was cordoned off by interior ministry special forces. Some of the protesters tried to break through the barricades and enter the Roma neighbourhood, throwing stones and fireworks at the policemen, who responded by dispersing the crowd with batons. According to Radnevo’s mayor Tenyo Tenev, the people who tried to break through the barricades were football hooligans from the nearby city of Stara Zagora. Speaking to public broadcaster BNT on Thursday, Tenev called on the people of Radnevo, a town of around 13,000 inhabitants, to protest peacefully. Tenev alleged that the incident that sparked the tensions was caused by one Roma family. “The people are fed up with the wrongdoings of this family, of their shameless, aggressive and arrogant behaviour,” he told media on Wednesday. The family has so far made no public response to the mayor’s allegations. Four people – a Roma man called Kalcho Ivanov and three of his relatives – were arrested and charged with attempted murder after they allegedly beat up three young men from Radnevo on Monday. One of the victims was admitted to hospital with a life-threatening knife-stab wound. The suspects‘ lawyer claimed however that one of the Roma men, Stefan Ivanov, was severely beaten up by the Bulgarians. People in Radnevo are now organising another rally, scheduled for Thursday evening.Meanwhile, people from the Roma neighbourhood told media that they are afraid for their lives and most of its inhabitants have temporarily left, moving in with friends and relatives outside Radnevo. Wednesday’s clashes were not unprecedented in Bulgaria, where in recent years tensions between people from Roma and ethnic Bulgarian backgrounds have erupted several times, usually over crime-related issues. The most violent clashes took place in 2011, when anti-Roma protests were held all over the country following tragic accidents in the southern Bulgarian village of Katunitsa which led to the deaths of two young Bulgarian boys. In 2015, protesters also occupied Roma ghettos in the southern Bulgarian village of Garmen, as well as in Sofa’s Orlandovtsi neighbourhood, but police prevented any violence from breaking out.
Source: Balkan Insight
Date: 05.50.2016
Neo-Nazis try to provoke local Roma in Přerov during 1 May protest
An assembly and march by about 30 neo-Nazis from the National Regeneration (Národní obroda – NO) group took place yesterday in Přerov. The leader of the NO, Pavel Matějný, gave a speech very similar to those he has given to previous such assemblies. Matějný’s speech attacked domestic nonprofit organizations such as Konexe and ROMEA, the European Union, NATO, and refugee reception. When the speeches were over, the march left the square and marched past the bus and train station. Riot police guarded the area around the station. A police monitoring vehicle also followed the march the entire time. The neo-Nazis attempted to provoke local Romani residents by marching directly past their homes. Local Romani crime prevention assistants contributed to making sure there were no conflicts. „The guys have been here since 9 AM and have gradually been visiting families to warn them this march will be going past their homes. They have done their best to make sure no conflicts happen,“ Pavel Grim, who works as a mentor for the crime prevention assistants with the Municipal Police there, told news server Denik.cz. „We have previously monitored the activities of this convener and we anticipated a low turnout. Our security measures were set up according to that. The riot officers were just here as backup, the situation outside was monitored by uniformed officers and members of the anti-conflict team,“ Michaela Sedláčková, the Contact Officer for National Minorities at the Regional Police Directorate in Olomouc, told news server Denik.cz.
Source: Romea.cz
Date: 02.05.2016
Roma face uncertain future amid Slovakia’s nationalist surge
Kosice (Slovakia) – His mouth open wide, four-year-old Milos is intent on managing a plate of fish and potatoes using adult-sized cutlery — a meal all too rare for the many Roma children living in squalor in Slovakia.
„Childhood obesity isn’t a problem here,“ kindergarten director Anna Klepacova told AFP, as she watched her pupils eat what is often their only meal of the day. Little Milos is one of over a hundred Roma children attending a pre-school at the impoverished Lunik IX housing estate, an urban wasteland in Slovakia’s second city of Kosice that looks more like a slum in the developing world than a neighbourhood in the eurozone. And there appears little hope for change following the general election in March. Surrounded by heaps of trash, Lunik’s massive, grim communist-era high-rise concrete apartment blocks have had no electricity, heat, gas or running water since utilities were cut more than a decade ago due to unpaid bills. Over-crowding is chronic, with 6,000 residents squeezed into quarters meant to accommodate half that number. Chimneys puffing thick, grey smoke, stick out some of windows; stoves installed in many of the flats are loaded with wood harvested from a nearby forest. Water is gathered in jerry cans from a ground floor outdoor faucet that only runs in the morning. Nearly 20 percent of Slovakia’s estimated 400,000 Roma live in abject poverty, in more than 600 shanty towns and slums mostly in the south and east of this economically successful eurozone country of 5.4 million people. A 2012 UN Development Programme report found that around 75 percent of the country’s Roma are unemployed, a rate seven-times higher than among non-Roma. Slovakia vowed in 2012 to eliminate discrimination in education and housing, but the results of last month’s general election suggest that life for Roma people is unlikely to improve anytime soon. The community lost Peter Pollak, its first and only member of parliament, after he failed to hold on to his seat in the March 5 ballot. Dominated by the racially charged anti-Muslim and anti-refugee policies of leading left and right-wing parties amid Europe’s migrant crisis, the election also ushered a stridently anti-Roma ultra-nationalist party into parliament for the first time. Continue reading Roma face uncertain future amid Slovakia’s nationalist surge
Czech Republic: Racist murderer of Romani man is ultra-right’s candidate in regional elections
Vlastimil Pechanec, who was convicted in 2003 of racially-motivated murder, will run in the Czech Republic’s regional elections this autumn as a candidate for the Worker’s Social Justice Party (Dělnická stranu sociální spravedlnosti – DSSS). Pechanec, who was characterized during his trial by expert witnesses as a recidivist whom it would be hard to reform, was sentenced to 17 years in prison for the racist murder of a Romani man, Otto Absolon, in the town of Svitavy, and was then released on parole after serving 12 years of that sentence. Before being sentenced for murder, Pechanec had been convicted of two other crimes, grievous bodily harm and rioting. In 2001 he attacked Mr Absolon with a knife when a group of Romani people entered a discotheque. Pechanec stabbed Mr Absolon twice in the abdomen and the 30-year-old victim died as a result of his wounds. According to the court, Pechanec addressed Mr Absolon with racist abuse before attacking and murdering him for absolutely no reason other than that he was a Rom. Mr Absolon was survived by two young children and his seriously ill common-law wife, who passed away one year later. Despite the evidence that resulted in his conviction, Pechanec insists he did not murder Mr Absolon. In 2014 Pechanec was released on parole and last year the court acceded to his attorney’s request that the biological material on the knife considered to be the murder weapon be re-tested. In December the court announced that no reason had been found to re-open Pechanec’s trial. Pechanec could continue seeking a retrial if a new expert witness assessment were to be submitted to the court, but he cannot afford one. He wants to raise the money through a „benefit concert“ in mid-March. Czech daily Mladá fronta Dnes (MfD) was the first to publish the information about Pechanec’s DSSS candidacy in its insert for the Pardubice Region. The author of that article, Jaroslav Hubený, felt the need to praise Pechanec’s prerequisites for becoming a politician, which he sees as the fact that Pechanec knows how to cheer on his favorite basketball team from the stands. „His relationship to sports illustrates that basketball fans in Svitavy have been able to repeatedly see him – and mainly hear him – at the league’s basketball games, where he has taken up the role of drummer and ‚cheerleader‘ with a megaphone in his hand. One prerequisite for a politician, i.e., that he not be afraid to stand up against a crowd and against his opponents, Pechanec definitely has,“ Hubený wrote in his article. Continue reading Czech Republic: Racist murderer of Romani man is ultra-right’s candidate in regional elections
Romania Accuses MPs of Defrauding Roma Projects
Romanian authorities are investigating two lawmakers for fraud related to the misuse of EU funds designed to support underprivileged Roma communities.
The law committee of the Romanian Parliament on Monday approved the arrest and prosecution of two deputies, Madalin Voicu and Nicolae Paun, who are being investigated for fraud related to EU-funded projects designed to assist the Roma community. Anti-graft prosecutors say that Voicu and Paun, both Roma themselves, together with other ten people, defrauded two projects aimed at training underprivileged people. Some 6,300 young people or people belonging to vulnerable social groups were supposed to be trained in social entrepreneurship initiatives. In reality, the target groups either did not get proper training or did not take part in projects at all. Meanwhile, those employed to run the projects were paid big salaries, without doing any work in some cases. The EU paid around 5.4 million euro for the projects while the Romanian authorities invested another 0.6 million euro. Both Voicu and Paun denied any wrongdoing. Paun’s Roma Party received some 300,000 euro for the two projects. All those those employed to carry out the projects had to pay a percentage of their salaries to the party. Voicu and his wife received close to 100,000 euro. He was allegedly paid to use his influence to get the projects approved for EU financing. In a related development, last week Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos dismissed the head of the tax authority and his deputy, as both are being investigated for favouring the perpetrators of the offences and for abuse of office. Investigators say the former tax bosses issued two orders exempting the payment of healthcare contributions by people who were fictitiously employed by the Roma Party. Human rights groups have often accused Romania – home to up to 2.5 million Roma, or roughly a sixth of the population – of not doing enough to improve their living standards or job prospects. Both Romania and the EU have earmarked funds for the better integration of the Roma, Europe’s largest ethnic minority. Romania is still considered one of the most corrupt states in the European Union and has made only limited progress in fighting corruption and organised crime since it joined the EU in 2007.
Source: Balkan Insight
Date: 16.02.2016
1938-1940: Deportation of the Roma and Sinti
Hitler’s pseudoscientific attack on the „Gypsies“ of Europe
In 1938, there were approximately 35,000 so-called Gypsies living in Germany and Austria. Named for their supposed origin in Egypt (the ethnic group actually originated in northern India), most of the “Gypsies” belonged to the Roma and Sinti tribes.
The Roma and Sinti in Europe had long suffered from discrimination and ostracism, which only worsened under the Third Reich. With the rise of Nazism came an obsession with racial purity and eugenics.
Hitler’s regime charged Dr. Robert Ritter, Dr. Sophie Ehrhardt and nurse Eva Justin with conducting extensive pseudoscientific research into the genealogies of Roma and Sinti communities. In 1940, Ritter claimed that 90% of “Gypsies” in Germany were “of mixed blood,” and “the products of matings with the German criminal asocial subproletariat.”
By this logic, anyone with a drop of Roma or Sinti blood was deemed alien, prone to criminality and unsuited for society. Tens of thousands of Roma and Sinti were deported to concentration camps, where they were subjected to forced labor, medical experimentation and extermination. Historians estimate that the Nazi regime and its allies killed around 25% of all European Roma, possibly as many as 220,000.
Pictures & Soure: Retronaut
Date: 29.12.2015