Roma leader says his people will be forced to beg on Britain’s streets

A Roma leader has warned that travellers who move to Britain from Romania and Bulgaria when the border restrictions are lifted will turn to begging or black market trades if they cannot access social welfare.

Rudko Kawczynski, president of the European Roma Travellers Forum, criticised the panic over the opening up of European Union labour markets to Romanians and Bulgarians from January, which has prompted fears about large numbers of Roma heading to Britain, France and Germany.

The Government has refused to say how many Roma it expects to come to Britain but campaign group MigrationWatch UK has predicted an influx of up to 50,000 people a year.

Mr Kawczynski admitted Roma immigrants may cause problems in the West but blamed the Romanian and Bulgarian governments for forcing them out of their home countries.

He said: “We had the same sense of panic when Poland was entering the EU.

“The Germans were so afraid. [They said] ‘We open the labour market for the Poles, they will come, they will overflow Germany.’

“What has happened? Nothing. Because then they had the chance to be legal migrants, to find jobs, to contribute to pay their taxes.

“Today we have a big problem because the people coming from our country, from Romania, our people from Bulgaria, who are forced to leave the country, this is something where people are mistaken, they are not leaving because they are poor.

“We have the poorest Roma in Greece and they are not coming.

“Why they are not coming?

“It’s not a question of poorness, poor is a synonym for Roma, but they are forced to leave their countries from Romania and Bulgaria and now from Slovakia because they are taking away their land. There are forced evictions and so on.”

He said EU countries should not complain about immigration after spending years arguing for democracy and free labour markets.

“The West preached for many, many years democracy, free labour markets, please come everybody who has a problems, he said in avideo interview on the Council of Europe website.

“Then on the other side they cannot enter the social welfare system, it’s impossible. Who’s arguing with that.

“Nobody can come to a country, like France or Germany, and say, ‘Here I am. Please, I want social welfare.’ It’s stupid, it’s nonsense. People are coming doing what they used to do, what they used to do in Romania, to beg or to be misused in the black market.”

He said Roma would continue to flood into the West until governments in their homelands in Eastern Europe were forced to address their plight.

“We are preaching like a broken record for more than 20 years since the beginning of this enlargement process, please, put all the political efforts to improve the living conditions of the people, to be accepted,” he said.

“For example the language should be accepted, the people should be accepted, they should be a part of the societies and not excluded day by day, more and more and more.

“And now, this is the outcome, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, what the Western countries did.

“They accepted Romania and Bulgaria like friends and they saw what they were doing with the Roma without intervening and now they have the same problems like the other countries.

“But we are suffering all the time, we are suffering in Bulgaria, we are suffering in Romania and we are suffering in France.”

He added: “Nobody wants to take Roma. They are marginalised.

“What we need is a political solution and we want to be involved.

“A growing part of our population is becoming nomads, non-registered people without education who are living on the streets.

“We are shifting more and more to a system which is comparable to the apartheid system in South Africa.”

Mr Kawczynski also called for Roma to be recognised as a European language, which would help them to assimilate.