A rights body has asked Bulgarian President Georgi Purvanov to withdraw a journalism prize awarded to a columnist for insulting Roma gypsies.
A statement from a Jewish human rights organization, the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), protested Tuesday the country's choice of recipient for its 2008 Chernorizetz Hrabar journalist award to Kalin Rumenev.
Writing racist articles in the national newspaper Novinar, Rumenev has insulted the Roma gypsy community and compared the gypsies to 'cattle'. He said they were 'multiplying like sheep' and can repel foreign investors from Bulgaria.
"This language is so redolent of the 1930s and 1940s when both Jews and gypsies were marked for Nazi extermination," the statement said.
Thus, the statement continued, the Bulgarian president should deprive the journalist of the best young journalist award. The statement also said that silence from the president would confirm that the whole country supports such a racist behavior.
Nine percent, or 700,000, of Bulgaria's population are gypsies which are known as Roma. The community is poverty-ridden and isolated in ghettos, largely illiterate and often discriminated.
FTP/PA