The West has failed to prevent anti-gypsy feeling

The debate goes on in Italy after a fire that caused the deaths of four children last week. Mario Marazzati, the Sant'Egido community's spokesperson, considers that "the west has not paid its dues to the gypsy Holocaust. And yet 300,000 of them were swallowed up into the Nazi extermination camps (The very doubt concerning the exact figures goes to show the indifference of historians). The West hasn't developed the antibodies that would stop the spreading of anti-gypsy feeling. There has been no compensation, no collective guilt, no shame. ... In Italy, the life expectancy of a Romany gypsy is 45. This is not because they are burnt alive in their caravans, but because of their living standards: illness accidents, malnutrition. ... The problem doesn't lie in the number of crimes they commit, because a normal country knows how to punish the guilty. The crimes are caused by poverty and marginalisation, not by 'gypsy culture'.”

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