Madam Deputy Prime Minister, Honoured Heads of State, distinguished colleagues, Rromale.

Please forgive the impromptu nature of my remarks, I only learnt an hour ago that I would be speaking this morning.

I want to say first of all that I am very grateful to have the opportunity to come to Sweden, and to be a part of this most significant and important event. But I must also confess to a certain bewilderment and some concern, since the motivation for the creation of this conference was initially a response to the rise in neo-Nazi activity, racism, persecution of minorities, fascism and so on which is spreading in Europe. Hence this conference. And the focal point of this conference of course and rightfully so, is the Holocaust.

But the primary target today in Europe of right-wing aggression and racist attacks are the Roma, my people, the Romani people, the so called "Gypsies." We were also second only to the Jews in the Holocaust, in terms of being victimized, singled out, the targets of attempted extermination. And yet that connection has not been made. It seems to me puzzling, given the reason for this conference, which is to remember what happened then, and to take it as a lesson and to apply it to what is happening now. Nobody on the first day talked about what happened to--what is happening to--Roma today in Europe. It has come up in one or two of the sessions when we have raised the issue ourselves, but it has not been a spontaneous issue at all. Tomorrow there will be a session on this in the Cultural Centre and I hope some of you will come and listen to that.

What I want to do in the time I have, is first of all make a plea to you to involve, to incorporate, the Romani issue into your teaching, into your journalistic coverage, into every aspect. Not just regarding the Holocaust, but also what is happening now. This is what it is all about, what is happening today and what is getting worse. People have talked about silence and how if the silence goes on long enough, the victims come to be blamed. There has been an awful lot of silence about Roma at this conference.

A suggestion was made by Professor Wiesel and acted upon on the first day, that a yearly conference like this be held here in Sweden. A wonderful idea and I would like to add to that, that I hope a session on the Romani situation will become a part of it, an annual part of it too. I will write a formal letter requesting that it should happen.

I want to tell you something very briefly about us, because part of the problem has to do with the vague understanding of what Roma, what "Gypsies" really are. Who are we? Where are we from? Why do people treat us the way they do? We are not a political threat, we are not an economic threat. We want nobody’s land. In that respect we have been targeted, certainly during the Third Reich, purely on genetic grounds. We were labeled as asocials, but asociality was considered, in our case, to be a genetic condition, and hence a racially inherited characteristic. The phrase, Lebensunwertes Leben, "lives unworthy of life," was first used in 1863 specifically with reference to Roma. It was used again in print in 1869, again only about Roma. It was in the title of a book by Binding and Hoche which came out in 1920, which tried to present a rational for euthanasia for certain groups of people–-for three categories of people. The middle category that applied to us, was those with incurable hereditarily acquired diseases; in our case the disease of criminality. And six months after Hitler came to power, that same phrase was part of the name of a law against lives unworthy of life. The first mention of the Endlösung der Zigeunerfrage, the Final Solution of the Gypsy question, was in 1938. Himmler used it in December 1938. But why? Why the hatred, why the animosity? We have to look to history and we have to realize that just like the Jews we were seen as the quintessential outsiders. Our ancestors were not Christians, had no territory, and were seen as a threat in a number of different ways. And because of that, because our culture, since our roots are in India. We left India because of Islamic invasions in the 11th century, we were pushed up in Europe because of the Islamic spread into the West in the Middle Ages.

Our language, our Indian language, our culture, still have much about them that is Indian as well as European, and because of that we are not part of European society, our values are different and so we were unsocial, asocial. We were kept on the fringes of European society for centuries and centuries and we still are. And we had to survive by finding food wherever we could, being refused service in stores, being refused access to the town pump, having to take food from the land and animals from the forest. We had to cook in the fields and we were called criminals because of it. This is the criminality we are talking about. That we are guilty of. Not murder, not rape, not extortion, not the kinds of crimes that we usually think of when we think of crime. If it is a crime to survive, then we are guilty of that crime. But it was sufficient to label us as hereditarily criminal-–criminal by nature. And the very same techniques used by the Nazis to deal with us have been suggested or even implemented since 1945. Incarceration. Deportation. Sterilization for example, into the 1980s. Some of the Heads of State who spoke on Wednesday affirmed their resolve to make sure that their governments would fight prejudice, discrimination, while in the past year or two those very same governments has refused entry to Roma, particularly from the Czech Republic, seeking asylum on the grounds of human rights violations. There is something very wrong here and I think it is because people do not really think about us as real. We are in the story books, we are in Disney movies. But in fact there are more Roma here in Europe than there are citizens of some countries. There are more Roma than there are Danes for example. We number in the millions, we are really here. We are real people with real problems who really exist. The Roma in Sweden are a strong, vibrant community, very willing to work with you, and to tell you about us. Don’t hesitate to involve them.

And so I ask you, please do not forget us, we are here and we are suffering. We do not want pity, but we want understanding, compassion and involvement from you.

Thank you very much.