He said Roma have asked him to issue a certificate to prove that they are exposed to repeated terrorist attacks and are political refugees in Hungary. Noting that he could only do that with approval from the Authority, he said emigration does not solve the prob-lem.

The preferred destinations for Roma seek-ing to emigrate are Canada, the UK, Sweden, Denmark, the US and Belgium.”

“The DNA specimens of two of the four murder suspects now in custody match those found at the scenes of murders of Roma over the past 13 months, police leaders told a Tuesday press conference.

National Bureau of Investigation (NNI) head Attila Petőfi and István Házi, leader of the National Police anti-crime unit, also said that guns seized from the suspects were used in the murders.

Petőfi said police suspect two of the men of carrying out all nine attacks on Roma and the other two of participating in one attack each. One of them took part in the first killing in Galgagyörk last July, and the other in the Tiszalök murder in April, when a man was shot dead as he set off to work a night shift.

It emerged that detectives were able to narrow down the number of suspects on the basis of mobile-phone data to the point where they knew which Debrecen bar they would be in early last Friday. When they found out that the suspects were preparing another crime, they did not wait any longer but acted.

Detectives initially suspected a three- or four-member team but after the dual murder at Nagycsécs last November they reduced the figure to one or two, Petőfi said.

National Police chief József Bencze told ATV that the series of attacks on Roma has ended with the capture of the assumed mur-derers. He said the mastermind of the mur-ders is among the four, but he would not say which of the four he is.

At the press conference, Házi thanked the 120 NNI detectives who worked on the case, the national security services, experts, citi-zens and those who provided information.

The suspects, aged 28-42 years, include a baker, a soldier and a sound technician with permanent or seasonal jobs, all from Debre-cen and the vicinity. Detectives are examining how the gang could afford expensive SUVs and firearms, as they could not afford them based on the income from their jobs.

Petőfi said police will not seek more sus-pects for the time being. Three of the men in custody have made a statement to police, but the fourth has refused to.

A police source confirmed that not only the brother-in-law of one of the murder sus-pects is a policeman, but that his sister also worked as the secretary to a Hajdú county po-lice chief. She is currently on maternity leave.

Three other men detained in October on suspicion of carrying out Molotov cocktail and armed attacks in Tarnabod last summer have now been set free. The three said they will sue the police for compensation.”

The BBC’s Ray Furlong examines what impact the landmark judgement has had.

There is no sense of victory in Berta Cervenakova’s small flat.

The four children, aged 13 – 18, still share the same bedroom they did eight years ago, when she first began her ultimately successful law suit against the Czech state.

The dilapidated tenement block in the northern Czech city of Ostrava is now a condemned building.

It doesn’t make up for the years she’s lost – the years when you learn to read, write, and count Berta Cervenakova

Last year the European Court acknowledged that Berta’s daughter, Nikola, now 18, had suffered discrimination by being sent to a special school for mentally disabled children, even though there was nothing wrong with her.

“They took her in for a psychological test. I was told to wait outside.”

“Then they gave me something to sign, and I signed. It said she was mentally retarded – but I had no idea what that meant,” she recalls.

She has received 4,000 Euros compensation. “But that doesn’t make up for the years she’s lost – the years when you learn to read, write, and count. I can’t even send her shopping. All she can do now is manual work.”

But the verdict was seen by Roma groups as an important tool to fight a practice that is found across Europe – lawsuits have followed in Greece and Croatia, while other countries have taken steps to desegregate classes.

Attitudes

Despite this, real change is slow to filter through. The Czechs abolished special schools in 2006 as criticism surrounding the court case grew.

Critics say the only change was on the nameplate by the door – and a visit to one former special school in Ostrava seemed to confirm this.

I can’t say: tomorrow you have to change the philosophy you’ve been teaching with for 20 years Ondrej Liska, Czech Education Minister

“In the first grade in a normal school, the kids can count to 20. Here, they can only count to five – although we want to teach them numbers up to 10,” says headmaster Jindrich Otzipka at the Ibsen school.

He takes me on a tour. In the eighth grade, a classroom for 14-year-olds, a brightly-coloured alphabet is on the wall.

“Normally the children would learn this at fourth grade. But these kids keep forgetting things, so you have to keep repeating them,” he says.

“I blame the parents. They don’t read to their kids. The Roma have no appreciation that you have to apply yourself to get on. They just live for the day.”

Views like this are commonplace in the Czech Republic, and were also voiced to me by other teachers. The Czech Education Minister, Ondrej Liska, says changing attitudes is his greatest challenge.

“We can’t say to those who teach like this: you have to go. That would lead to a collapse of the school system.”

“I want to see in two years that teachers in schools with a high percentage of Roma children have appropriate training and I want to see a major shift in these schools – but I can’t say: tomorrow you have to change the philosophy you’ve been teaching with for 20 years.”

Choices

They don’t send their kids to school because they don’t want them to be white Radek Bhanga, Roma rapper

But members of the Roma community tell me Roma parents also need to take more responsibility for how their children get on at school.

“I wasn’t at a special school because my parents were strict with me,” says Radek Bhanga, a Roma rapper who draws large, mixed-race audiences – mixing hip-hop with traditional gypsy sounds.

He has become notorious for challenging what he has called the ‘victim mentality’ of Czech Roma.

“Czech people are racist and xenophobic. But many Gypsies are worse. They don’t send their kids to school because they don’t want them to be white. It’s a big mistake. We can talk about racism. But we live in a democratic country and everyone can make choices.”

Sinti

After talking to Radek, I head for Germany – where there have been similar problems getting Sinti children into mainstream schools. I want to see what effect 30 years of strident efforts at integration have had.

My visit to the special school in Straubing, Bavaria, is more upbeat than my visit to the school in Ostrava. The lessons I see seem much more demanding. But still, the Sinti are massively over-represented.

“The Sinti families see this school as their school,” says headmaster Wolfgang Steinbach.

“They send us their children, and we try to send them back to a normal school. But they like to have their kids in schools where the other Sinti are.”

Sinti teaching assistants like Manuela and Nadia support children entering mainstream education

They do special classes with Sinti teaching assistants to prepare the children to re-enter mainstream schooling.

In one class, I meet Leo – who will be transferring up to a normal school next year.

Leo is a cheeky, funny character, with podgy cheeks and jet-black hair.

He says the work in this school frustrates him and that new Sinti assistants at the new school will make him feel at home. But it took a year to persuade his parents to have him transferred.

The experience here is a warning to anyone expecting quick change in the Czech Republic after the Strasbourg ruling.

But Jim Goldston, the lawyer who represented Berta Cervenakova on behalf of the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) says the judgement is still a crucial moment.

“The parents of many of the children in special or sub-standard schools are themselves the products of a discriminatory educational environment. That will affect their children’s chances.”

“So there are problems within many affected communities, but the principal burden rests on government to make clear that discrimination must end.”

Thursday, June 19, 2008 (Mumbai)

A team of officials from Hungary, which has a high population of itinerant gypsies, was in Mumbai to study the work being done to improve the lives of Dalits and to take some lessons back home.

”Gypsies were looked upon as strange people when they were nomads, and that was 200 years ago. The alienation continues,” said Timea Borovzsky, chief of the Directorate General for Equal Opportunities (DGEO) of the Hungarian Ministry of Education and Culture.

”It is like the caste discrimination against Dalits in India,” said Borovzsky.

Borovzsky along with two other members from the DGEO extensively toured the dry rocky interiors of the Vidarbha region in northeastern Maharashtra.

During their quiet visit, they studied how Dalits live in huts lit by hurricane lamps and cope with caste prejudices.

”We wanted to personally see the kind of projects that have been implemented in India to help Dalits come up,” said DGEO deputy director general Gabor Sarkozi.

”In Europe, there are 15 million gypsies and in Hungary, the population ranges somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000. They are the biggest ethnic minority and the most slurred community,” Sarkozi added.

Suri Szilivia, a researcher and interpreter with DGEO, said, ”Gypsies or Cigan as they are called in Hungary have a thousand-year-old connection with India. The semantics of their language is similar to Sanskrit.

”But more than this, Indian social reformer Babasaheb Ambedkar is a revered figure to them as well as to us researchers in Hungary,” said Suri.

”In any public place, most majority ethnic community members would just sidle away rather than be seen with a Cigan. The Romas are reluctantly served in hotels or given respectable jobs. Even the tone towards them has a derogatory tint,” Suri added.

Sarkozi pointed out that in Hungary, ”gypsies (a political incorrect word) or Roma or Cigan are forced to live with mythical social stereotypes like the way you (India) have the so-called criminal tribes.”

”They are brown-skinned and they have the highest school drop-out rates. They are looked down upon and people shun them. They live in ghettoes, though these slums are not as bad as we saw in villages near Nagpur,” said Sarkozi.

Sarkozi also said that the Hungarian government has for the past few years been trying to uplift this community which, at present has the highest unemployment rate and gets seasonal employment at construction sites or as daily wage farm labour.

According to Borovszky, ”One of the reasons we selected India was precisely because the nature of discrimination is so similar between them and the Dalits.

”We found several projects extremely interesting, innovative and socially relevant for bringing a change in any depressed or marginalised community,” said Borovszky.

Sarkozi said that the discrimination has become more overt in the last 20 years. ”Earlier during the communist regime it was never there. But now parallel structures of discrimination have come up. We want them to be absorbed in mainstream society and to be treated equally.”

So what about reservations for this community in institutions? 

”Though we do not have any such policies, a similar project was introduced earlier but it was not successful. In the last 20 years, several groups like Neo-Nazis and Skinheads have come up. So far they have not become violent but they are extremely virulent about such policies,” Sarkozi said.

Talking about the projects that the study group intends to introduce in Hungary for gypsies, Szilivia said, ”We intend to implement the book bank project and moreover introduce workshops for teachers so that they learn to empathise with these marginalised people.

”In our tour, we found Ambedkarites and NGOs working with Dalits having empathy coupled with irrepressible zest. This is one thing we want to infuse among teachers working in schools meant for gypsies,” added Sarkozi.

 In 16 June 2007, I was invited by Derdak Tibor and Orsos Janos in Hungary to see the Gypsy people and their life. I stayed in my friend Orosos Janos house.Derdak Tibor and Orsos Janos want to make strong relation with the T.B.M.S.G. Buddhist community. So that they have invited me there to see the same problems they have which we Dalit people were experience 75 years ago.T.B.M.S.G. Is Buddhist Ambedkarites movement.Orsos Janos wants to establish like this organization in Hungary for the Roma/Gypsy people.Orsos Janos is the founder president of “Jaibhim Network”.Derdak Tibor and Orsos Janos work together for the Gypsy poor people to uplift their living standard.
                        Tibor read about Ambedkarite movement in a French Buddhist magazine at the beginning of 90es.He studied the Life of Dr.Ambedkar and his movement. He started to wrote about Dr Ambedkar in monthly newsletter of Tankapuja Buddhist Church.Subhuti find it in England.Subhuti immediately went to met them in may 2005.Tibor and Janos shown him their work in Alsoszentmarton,Sajokaza,oszo,Gilmanfa,Tomor.Subhuti invited Tibor and Janos in Dec.2005 at Dhammakranti retreat,Nagpur, Maharastra, India. They became Dhammamitra there. They met with me and became a very good friend

                         They were very much inspired from T.B.M.S.G. Buddhist organisation.After two years they came again in India with their friend Ujlaky Andras.He work together with them in Hungary.
It was the history how they come to know about TBMSG?

Unemployment is another major problems in gypsy people due to the lack of education.sometime they have employment in entertainment,farm work,shop cleaner.I did-not find there a single gypsy man who have good business/work.In Hungary,Gypsy people have the nationality of Hungary so they called as Hungarian Gypsy.If they went to search the job in cities like Budapest,pecs then they need to keep their identity card to show the police that they have nationality and they are not criminals.These people looks different than Hungarian white people,it is easy to differentiate between them.Once I and my friend Janos Orsos was travailing in Budapest by city bus.We was waiting for the city bus at the Bus stop,after sometime police car come near to us and asked us `show the identity card`. policemen did-not asked other white people over-there but they asked us because of different skin colour.Janos told me if he want to come in Budapest or like this cities then he should have to keep his identity card to show policemen to ensure that he is not belongs to criminal.Every time policeand white people discriminate.He told if he travelled from the bus,no one like to sit near to him.So that they called themselves the untouchables of Hungary.Orsos Janos said me “if some Gypsy youngsters came here in the cities to earn money then white people used to told them don’t come here,it is not Gypsy people place.They tried to stop them in the villages only.Janos was told me his experience once he was traveled in the bus there were no free sit to sit in bus.In that bus had one white old lady who did-not have place to sit so Janos had given her his sit so she given him thanks “koszonom” from the returning of place where he reached that time unfortunately same old lady in the same bus.she had place near to her but she didn’t asked to janos to sit near her.she occupied this empty place with her won bag.So it shows that there is much untenability between Gypsy and white Hungarian people.Hungarian White people don’t like to give equal respect to Gypsy people.