German citizenship for children of the Roma refugees from Kosovo called for

On the Day of the Refugee (02.10) the Society for Threatened Peoples STP (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker GfbV) has called for German citizenship to be given to the approximately 4,500 children and young people of the Roma from Kosovo living in Germany. "These children and young people now feel themselves at home or have been born here, they speak German as their mother tongue, go to German schools, are often trained in German firms and are generally accepted by their German teachers and fellow-pupils and integrated”, said the STP chair, Tilman Zülch, on Thursday in Göttingen. "We must at last accept them and their parents as new citizens!”

The human rights expert criticised that members of this minority are often rejected by the Aliens departments and politicians and are thus victims of latent racism. This situation is reminiscent of the discrimination of the coloured Americans in the USA, which lasted for decades. The great philosopher and member of the STP advisory council, Ernst Tugendhat, has characterised the situation of the Sinti and Roma in Germany in this way: "In the Third Reich we Jews were considered to be sub-humans. The "gypsies” are today often not openly termed sub-humans, but are felt and treated as such”.

Germany must now set a sign for the Roma minority, which like the Jewish ethnic group was victim of the Holocaust, demanded Zülch. "Up to the year 2000 more than 120,000 Jews from the states of the Russian Federation were accepted and naturalised. More than two million Germans from Russia, who were deported to Siberia and central Asia under Stalin, have been allowed to come here. We would be well advised to hold out a hand to the Roma who fled between 1991 and 1999, first from the Serb, then from the Albanian extremists from Kosovo.”