A message to you, rude EU

As the European Roma Rights Centre continues to note an alarming rise in anti-Roma violence on the continent (in the Czech Republic alone there have been at least ten firebomb attacks against Romani people in recent months), the injustices faced by Roma on a daily basis are not going unnoticed.

Rajan Zed is a Hindu statesman and president of the Universal Society for Hinduism, believes the rising tide of violence and harsh political rhetorric aimed at Romanies is a particular cause for his own people, the Hindus.

Hindus share their Indian heritage with Romani people, as well as many customs and words from their language (the Hindi word for night is raat or raatri, and the words for the numbers one to five- ek, dow, teen, chaar, paanch- all come from the same root as the Romani words).

Last month, Mr Zed made a statement urging the Czech Republic to take notice of a report by the country's own Interior Ministry which highlighted the prevalence of racism against Romani people.

More recently, he has commented on the need for Hungary and Bulgaria to cease their "scapegoating" of Roma people. Even long before the banking crisis and global recession, unemployment among Romani people in Hungary stood at 74% for men and 83% for women, a figure that is likely to have since increased (source: The Guardian, 8th January 2003).

Zed has also suggested that proper acknowledgement of the long history of atrocities committed against Romanies across Europe must be given, both through public memorial sites and inclusion in school history books.

Persecutions of Romani people, which include 500 years of brutal mass enslavement in the Romanian territories and the murder of hundreds of thousands of Romanies across huge swathes of continental Europe during World War II, often stem from ancient anti-Gypsy prejudices linked to suspicion of Romani people's non-European appearance and Indian language and culture.

Rajan Zed also spoke out against the police eviction of a Roma encampment at Kalasatama in Helsinki, Finalnd, which too place last August. Romanian Roma have immigrated to Finland in small numbers in recent years, while the indigenous Romanies of Finland, the Kaale, have lived there since the early 16th Century.