Backing Nobel laureate Grass’s call, Hindus ask Germany to stop deporting Roma children

NEVADA - Hindus have expressed shock at reported German policy of deporting Roma children who were born in Germany, and have supported Nobel laureate Gunter Grass who has reportedly accused Germany of an appalling breach of human rights on Roma deportations to Kosovo.

Eminent Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada (USA) today, said that it was irresponsible on the part of Germany to deport them to Kosovo where they reportedly faced excessive poverty.

Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, further said that these children suddenly found themselves in a new country which they never had visited with no knowledge of its Albanian and Serbian languages and poverty-stricken in an impoverished part of Europe.

According to reports, many of thus deported children dropped out of school, mostly because their families could not afford. Lacking proper papers, many of them became stateless. These children, for whom Germany was a home, ended up as strangers in a new country and some of them resulted in living in extreme poverty and even below the hunger line, Rajan Zed added.

Zed urged Switzerland, Sweden and Austria and some other European countries also not to forcibly deport Roma children to Kosovo as Kosovo lacked the infrastructure to protect their human rights. Moreover, Roma were reportedly a vulnerable minority in Kosovo.

Grass has reportedly called Germany’s Roma deportations ‘a scandal’ and has written an open letter to Germany Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere protesting sending back 8,500 Kosovo Roma refugees. He reportedly argued that Germany was sending into poverty abroad children born on its soil who had lived in the country for 15 years. ‘No housing, no food, no social contacts, no schools, no work: that’s the reality for people kicked out into Kosovo,’ he was reported to have said.

Novelist Gunter Wilhelm Grass (The Tin Drum), 83, won Nobel Prize for literature in 1999. Hinduism, oldest and third largest religion of the world, has about one billion adherents and moksh (liberation) is its ultimate goal. (ANI)