Jewish group urges Bulgarian president to withdraw prize to alleged anti-gypsy

SOFIA (AFP-EJP)---The Simon Wiesenthal Centre called Tuesday on Bulgaria's president to withdraw a journalism prize awarded to a columnist it says compared gypsies to animals.

A statement from the Jewish human rights organisation's director for international relations, Shimon Samuels, protested the country's choice of recipient for its 2008 Chernorizetz Hrabar journalistic award.

"The laureate, Kalin Rumenov, is reported to have written racist articles on a regular basis, attacking the Roma Gypsy community in the national newspaper Novinar," Samuels said, urging President Georgy Parvanov to withdraw the prize.

The newspaper was not immediately available to comment but Samuels quoted excerpts of articles where Rumenov compared the gypsies to "cattle" and said they were "multiplying like sheep."

"This language is so redolent of the 1930s and 1940s when both Jews and Gypsies were marked for Nazi extermination," Samuels said.

The award was received by Kalin Rumenov at an official ceremony in Sofia in May in the presence of leading politicians, members of Parliament and journalists.

Several Bulgarian professional groups set up a petition for the prize to be publicly withdrawn, calling on the President and the Prime Minister of Bulgaria, who were present at the ceremony, to make a public declaration that they do not share the values represented by the racist author.

An estimated 700,000 gypsies or Roma live in Bulgaria, forming nine percent of the country's population. The community is poverty-ridden and isolated in ghettos, largely illiterate and often discriminated.

Insufficient Housing for the Gypsy Population in Sofia

The problem with the supply of housing for the gypsy population in Sofia is a hard one to solve because Sofia Municipality has no more than 50 apartments available while the applicants for housing are over thirty thousand.

The Secretary of Sofia Municipality Rossen Zheliazkov said at the Municipal Council after being asked what measure will be taken regarding the illegally inhabiting gypsies from the Batolova vodenitza district.

Zheliazkov stressed that the municipality must take the responsibility to provide terrains for gypsy housing while the State must have a national policy towards the minority.

Meanwhile the City Council decided to spend over 2 million on covering the damages in the vicinity around the exploded military storage facility in Chelopechene.

Bulgaria's childrens homes creak under weight of social ills

SOFIA (AFP) — Faced with the urgent problem of some 8,000 abandoned children, Bulgaria is desperately trying to modernise its network of dilapidated orphanages amid revelations of paedophilia and cruelty.

Deliberately built in isolated settings by the previous communist regime, its 144 state "homes for children deprived of parental care" have an odd formal purpose, given orphans account for just two percent of their population.

Social affairs minister Emilia Maslarova explains that many are readily given up by their parents, but that these parents refuse to sign away parental rights which prevents the children from entering adoption programmes.

The depth of the sector's problems hit home earlier this month when an adolescent girl in an orphanage in the western town of Tran was killed, with another boy and girl injured by a man who subsequently committed suicide.

The killer, a 67-year-old paedophile with a rape conviction already on his record, apparently succumbed to jealous rage over special attention paid to the injured gypsy girl by a member of the orphanage's staff.

Meanwhile, in northwestern Bulgaria, three young girls at an orphanage in Berkovitsa told New Television station that three men paid them "to undress" and "to play doctors."

The centre's director acknowledged that "paedophiles have shown interest in the children."

At Plovdiv, in the south, several children were able to eat rat poison held within their dormitories, which they thought was candy.

And in Sofia, another young girl was injured when she fell from a window while trying to hang herself with an improvised cord made out of bed sheets.

According to the management of one orphanage, these incidents can be explained due to poor supervision as it is difficult to attract qualified staff with salaries of 170 euros (265 dollars) per month.

Prosecutors have launched investigations into the conditions at state orphanages in the country of 7.7 million inhabitants, still struggling to cope with the transition from a communist to a capitalist economy.

"Homes right across the country are in a deplorable state and incidents such as these can happen anywhere," Zoia Sokolova, director of Sofia orphanage 'Assen Zlatarov' told AFP.

This centre, held up as a model for the system, "barely keeps (its) head above water" and is also toiling with a dearth of qualified personnel.

Centralised efforts to move away from the cruel practice of isolating mentally handicapped or delinquent children have created a strain on resources which is proving very difficult to manage.

"Twenty percent of our children come from families with serious problems, 14 percent have been convicted of crimes and another eight percent have suffered from sexual violence," Sokolova added.

"People expect that our homes can produce miracles.... Without (proper) support from the authorities, it's an absurd expectation."

On the grounds of poor care, the government agency charged with protecting children's rights has recommended the closure of sites such as the one at Tran and a home for mentally handicapped children at Mogilinio, in the north.

But these orphanages continue to operate because their staff have jobs which cannot be given up.

"The homes produce marginals, outsiders," says Slavka Koukova of Bulgaria's Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, part of an international network of independent, not-for-profit watchdogs which has been monitoring these homes for years.

"The problems within these homes stem from incompetence at every level," she underlined.

Efforts at reform have been underway since 2001, with the very worst orphanages closed and families, usually Roma (gypsy), given encouragement to take their children back.

Some adoptions, however, have been snarled up in red tape for as long as three or four years, whereas the very fact of living in these establishments hinders a child's development, Sokolova said.

In 2003, Bulgaria began reforming its adoption system to bring it into line with international norms and in an effort to stamp out corruption and child trafficking.

But the net result has been a sharp fall in the numbers finding new families: just 708 children were adopted in 2007, against 1,600 per year prior to the changes.

Copyright © 2008 AFP. All rights reserved.

Roma's isolation in Bulgaria - fertile grounds for tension

By Elena Lalova, dpa


Sofia (dpa) - Violence targeting Roma and committed by Roma is not unusual in Bulgaria. But the recent explosion of violent hatred in a quarter in the capital Sofia has gone far beyond the ordinary and finally raised the question about the cause of the problem.

Over two nights last week, hundreds of Gypsy men went on a rampage in the Krasna Polyana part of the capital. Waving knives, axes and poles and screaming "death to Bulgarians," the mob torched dust bins, damaged cars and demolished a shop.

Only a massive deployment of special police prevented anyone from getting killed. The media and politicians have since been speculating as to what caused the outbreak.

The Roma say that they wanted to protect themselves from the violently chauvinist, skinhead gangs who go about beating up and molesting the Gypsies on a regular basis.

So, in preventive retaliation, four Gypsies attacked a bald-headed man in a pub and three of his colleague. However, he turned out not a skinhead, but a well-armed employee of a security firm. It may be the fear and frustration of the foiled attackers which sparked the subsequent violence.

Frightened by what it saw, the public has been pressing the authorities for action. Interior Minister Rumen Petkov has promised the "full power of the law" against those responsible for the riot and discussed the issue with President Georgi Parvanov.

Some speculate that trouble was a result of "political interests" and aimed to "liven things up" ahead of municipal polls. That train of thought leads to the conclusion that Gypsies actually rioted to push up the price of their votes in the elections.

In Bulgaria, it is a public secret that the political parties effectively buy the Gypsy votes.

"The Roma vote is an expensive item," said Antonina Zhelyaskova, the head of the Sofia-based Minorities Research Centre.

Of the 7.6 million Bulgarians, some 650,000 are Roma, the centre estimates. Among them, the unemployment rate is a whopping 71 per cent and two-thirds of them survive on less than 100 leva (60 dollars) monthly. Some 68 per cent never achieve basic schooling.

"There are parallel worlds here," Zhelyaskova said, referring to the absence of communication between the mainstream and the Gypsy community.

"That is fertile grounds for tension," she said, adding that relations have "significantly worsened," even as one-fourth of the period declared as the "Decade of Roma Integration" has passed.

Pressed by the European Union, which it joined on January 1, Bulgaria has launched a series of projects aimed to improve the integration of the Roma.

It will however take much more to eliminate the deeply-rooted prejudice, Zhelyakova warned. In some cases, the effort has backfired, drawing sour complaints from Slavic Bulgarians that the Gypsies felt themselves to be "above the law."

In a reaction, a nationalist "Volunteer Guard" has been set up in three cities. The fledgling organization so far has only around 35 "troops" in Sofia and branches in the second-largest city of Plovdiv as well as in Jambol and Veliko Tarnovo.

The declared goal of the group, dressed in uniforms that not by coincidence are reminiscent of the Hitler Youth of Nazi Germany, is to "protect the life, property and families of citizens ... from the terror of Gypsies."

Cart ban infringes gypsy rights: Bulgarian MPs

2 August 2007 21:43 FOCUS News Agency

Sofia. A Bulgarian parliamentary committee Thursday accused the city of Sofia of discriminating against gypsies by banning the use of horse carts around the city.

"Carts are listed as 'vehicles' under Bulgarian traffic rules so the ban is a form of segregation," committee chairman Lalo Kamenov told bTV television.

"The inhabitants of the Filipovtsi gypsy neighbourhood just outside Sofia cannot even cross the ringroad" around the city with their carts, he said.

Many gypsies, or Roma, provide for their families by gathering scrap iron and transporting it on carts to recycling centres.

Sofia's authorities have long banned the circulation of horse carts in the city centre but the gypsies have not protested that ban as they rarely travel downtown.
Sofia Mayor Boyko Borisov said he would not lift the measure despite the committee's recommendation to do so. He advised the gypsies instead to "turn their carts into carriages and attract tourists the way they do in Vienna."

Source: AFP