EUROPE: Eight European governments unveil an unprecedented plan today to solve chronic social problems among the Continent's largest, poorest and fastest-growing minority.
Most of Europe's 10 million gypsies, or Roma, are prevented by centuries-old prejudice from gaining a good education and finding work, miring them in poverty-ridden ghettos that breed crime and disease.
Prime ministers from Central Europe will present 10-year action plans today on how to bridge the yawning gap between the living standards of the Roma and the rest of the region's population, according to officials in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, where the launch takes place.
The Decade of Roma Inclusion initiative unites new EU members Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, candidate countries Romania and Bulgaria and long-term hopefuls Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia-Montenegro, in trying to integrate gypsies into societies where they are usually treated as pariahs.
"The decade offers an opportunity to turn the tide of history and harness the political will to include the Roma as full citizens in European societies," said Mr James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, which also supports the project.
According to the bank, more than two-thirds of Roma in Romania and Bulgaria live on less than €2 a day, while about three-quarters of all gypsies fail to gain even a primary school education.
In the Czech Republic, Roma children are 15 times more likely than others to be put in schools for the mentally handicapped while, in Slovakia, tens of thousands live in illegal shanty towns with no electricity or running water.
Under the initiative the governments will make a range of commitments to their Roma populace, from building new houses to integrate them with the wider community to employing gypsy teaching assistants to stop Roma youngsters being shoved into special-needs schools.
"The situation is alarming in a number of countries," says Mr Claude Cahn, programmes director at the European Roma Rights Centre in Budapest.
"Some Roma communities are literally starving. When EU officials see the situation in some candidate countries they are shocked." While Brussels does raise Roma rights with its new and aspiring members, Mr Cahn says it could take decades to root out the prejudice that makes gypsies a target of abuse across Europe.
"Racism as a whole is on the European agenda, but we would like to see it addressed as the highest priority," Mr Cahn says.
"The Roma situation has to be seen holistically. It is hard to give quality education to a community in which when no one is working, and it is hard to have stable employment when people are cut off from the health service." "There is unemployment of 100 per cent among Roma in some places. In others, many of them work in the 'grey economy'. Lots of people are working very hard while not making much money or gaining the access to services and benefits that regular employment brings." While poor health education and living standards mean gypsies on average die younger than their non-Roma neighbours, they also have much higher birth rates: about half of Europe's 10 million gypsies are under 20.
Nationalists in several countries talk of a rising "gypsy tide", and tap into the fears of poor communities that are struggling to adapt to post-communist competition, and into age-old prejudice that derides the Roma as inveterate thieves and lay-abouts.
At an event last week commemorating the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Mr Romani Rose, a leader of Germany's Sinti and Roma communities, said gypsies faced growing persecution in Europe, 60 years after Nazis murdered about 500,000 of them in the Holocaust.
"The alarming rise in racist violence against Sinti and Roma, Europe's largest minority, fails to attract the much-needed attention of political circles and public opinion," he told assembled dignitaries at Auschwitz.
"If only European states saw the Sinti and Roma communities in their countries as part of their own societies and history, then the vision of a European home could become a reality."
Supporters of the Decade of Roma Inclusion want it extended into Western Europe and east into Ukraine and Russia. But the fine words that will be spoken in Sofia today must be followed by action, and win both political and public backing. "It is very important that the political elite declare that gypsies are not foreign, that we have to help them to help themselves," says Mr Laszlo Teleki, a gypsy who is Hungary's state secretary in charge of Roma affairs. "If we don't get enough empathy, enough support, then it won't work."