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Roma Initiative: Gov't Hasn't Done Anything to Resolve Roma Issue
Wednesday 05 May 2010 Zoom in | Print page
Banska Bystrica, May 5 (TASR) - The Roma Initiative in Slovakia (RIS) is concerned about the lack of attention being paid to resolving Roma problems in Slovakia by the current Government, RIS chairman Alexander Patkolo said at a press conference in Banska Bystrica on Wednesday.
Even though the three Coalition parties - Smer-SD, LS-HZDS and the Slovak National Party (SNS) - presented the Roma problem as a priority before the 2006 election, nothing has been done in this respect 'as a priority', Patkolo claims.
According to him, the biggest problems exist in the sphere of education and housing. "The Education Minister (Jan Mikolaj/SNS) didn't improve the education rate of Roma people - quite the opposite, the number of special schools, where Roma children are treated as mentally retarded, has gone up," he points out. "For example, almost no Roma (student) studies at the Roma culture department at Constantine the Philosopher university in Nitra any longer," he stressed.
According to Patkolo, the number of segregated Roma villages was supposed to fall but it has been rising instead.
In addition, he criticises the way of drawing about €200 million from the EU package directed toward the Roma for the period 2007-13 which hasn't been used so far. "We worry that these financial means would be misused or lost," he said.
Patkolo is running for the election on the slate of the Alliance for Europe of Nations (AZEN), which was formed earlier this year by ex-HZDS MP Jozef Urbani. As a candidate, Patkolo warns about the possibility that Roma votes will be bought during the election on June 12, and he wants to ask the relevant EU bodies to come and oversee the election.
At the end, he expressed his outrage about the recently-launched billboard campaign by SNS that displays a photograph of a heavily tattooed bare-chested Roma man with a gold chain and the slogan: 'So that we don't feed those who don't want to work'.
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