20-February-05
The Economist, in this weeks edition has published an article entitled "Russian xenophobia, the new Jews". In this article, they publish a statistic of Russian attitude towards minorities in which it turns out that most Russians (over 50%) would not want to work with Roma, a situation worse than for the Chechens, and that over 40% of the Russians would prefer the country to be free of Rroma. As such, Roma seem to fare only marginally better than Chechens in the Russian psyche.
The astonishing fact, however, is not this unfortunate attitude of Russians towards Rroma, but the fact that in this article, Rroma are nowehere to be found. While the author of the article dwells on the situation of North-Caucasians, foreign students, Indians, Jews, no word is lost on the fate of Rroma. One can only but wonder that a published statistic, on which a large part of the article is build, simply ignores one of its most salient facts.