DISCRIMINATION against Roma is an underreported reality and the truth is that there is a long tradition of open hostility towards Gypsy children across Europe, said The Guardian in an editorial on Thursday. Excerpts: Rarely has a leak done more valuable work. A memo from France's interior ministry this week confirmed that President Nicolas Sarkozy's war on Traveller camps had an explicit racial dimension, with Roma people being deliberately targeted. By doing so, it has jolted the European commission out of indulging the Sarkozy stunt, and into a full-throated attack on Paris. It has stirred overdue introspection in France about how minorities are treated, even while its politicians stampede to use the law to persecute those few Muslim women who wear a face veil. And it has highlighted how Europe's largest minority, the 10 million-plus Roma people, suffer right across the continent's boundaries. For France is not alone. The systematic discrimination against Roma in eastern Europe – where Gypsy children have often been routinely packed off to schools for the “mentally deficient” – is an acknowledged if underreported reality. But with the EU's eastward expansion and the migration that followed, eastern attitudes have been spreading west. While the Danes have been seeking to expel some Roma, Swedish police have been caught illegally forcing others out of the country. As Germany has repatriated Gypsy children to Kosovo, the Belgians have driven a camp out of Flanders and the Italians have used the presence of Roma as reason to declare a state of emergency. __
