Czech Republic accuses France of racism

With an eye to France's Roma policy, Czech President Václav Klaus and Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg have accused French President Nicolas Sarkozy of racist tendencies. But publicist Jiří Pehe advises the Czechs to look to their own back yard in his blog for the web portal aktualne.cz: "First of all we had deputy prime minister Čunek going on about 'sun tanned' citizens. ... Schwarzenberg and the majority of Czech politicians also did nothing to stop the mayor of Chomutov when she took measures to recover the money owed by Roma families and even went as far as to cut their social benefits. With the emerging crisis the Topolánek government organised the deportation of foreign labourers and sent them home by plane, just as the French did to the Roma. ... Millions of immigrants live in France. Czech criticism of the allegedly racist French will only be believable when our country has a similar ethnic make-up. For now however, we live in a country where Roma children are put away in special schools and the Roma are moved to ghettos on the outskirts of town."

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