All over Wetern Europe a new generation of Roma are arriving, in flight from persecution, discrimination, ethnic cleansing and/or other hardships in Eastern Europe. The reemergence and acceleration of genocidal attacks on Romani populations in Eastern Europe, since the collapse of Socialism, have lead Roma into forced flight and migration. In Western Europe too, skinhead and mob attacks against Roma are on the rise. International organizations have done virtually nothing to help this group of people, a population who both historically and currently bare no responsibility for initiating or voluntarily participating in ethnic conflicts or wars. This is the situation faced by tens of thousands of Roma who have fled from Kosovo during and in the aftermath of the NATO bombing which ended in June, 1999.

International Human Rights Monitors are busily debating whose rights come first and whose needs are greater. Some argue that economic, social and cultural rights should come before civil and political rights; a person's right to eat is more important than another person's freedom of expression. Others argue that civil and political rights are most important, and only when these are achieved will people be insured of their economic, social, and cultural rights.

The fact is that all human rights are inter-dependent. The daily reality confronting the Romani people across Europe is that they do not enjoy any of these rights, nor do they have anyone advocating on their behalf. In general, Roma have received little or no help from the community of international human rights organizations and nongovernmental organizations, (NGO's), prior to the NATO bombing of Kosovo.

Now there are a few, precious few, humanitarian organizations helping Roma in and from Kosovo. But the occupation of Kosovo by Western Governmental Institutions and NGO's, whose purposes are supposedly the benign offering of economic and humanitarian aid to the people there, is compounded by Western jingoism. There are often political motivations, far less benign than they are made out to be, underlying the distribution of humanitarian aid.

Who receives this aid and how the aid distribution is publicized, indicates the needs of many of these international institutions to show the world how great they are and how politically correct they are; in other words, a self-serving public relations game. In the meantime, even the NGO's and governmental bodies themselves admit that what aid is reaching the people of Kosovo is pathetically meager, and not equitably distributed amongst the different ethnic groups in and from the region.

Only a handful of Romani organizations have begun to tackle the enormous task of making the world aware of their invisible people's plight; a people facing a "New Age Holocaust". The lack of world attention for what Roma in Europe are currently facing is analogous to what befell the Romani victims of the Holocaust after WWII. Very few Holocaust spokespeople have ever mentioned that estimates of more than 1.5 million Roma were the victims of the Third Reich's extermination campaign.

This Romani invisibility is still going on, with very few NGO's advocating for and providing aid to Roma inside and out of the former Yugoslavia. Roma are dying in cities and villages throughout the country they used to call home; prior to the war, 1.2 million Roma lived in the former Yugoslavia. The only victims of the turmoil there who receive ongoing and persistent public attention are the Bosnians, Croats and Kosovo Albanians. Why does this division exist between the recognition of Kosovo Albanian, Bosnian Muslim, and Croatian refugees and the Romani refugees? The first three ethnic groups are seen as political refugees, in strong opposition to the Serbian regime of the former Yugoslavia, with ties to extreme nationalist movements, former fascist collaborators, and eager to ally themselves to the interests of Western Capitalism. Roma, on the other hand, are a people with no historical or current territorial claims within the former Yugoslavia, no political representation, economically weak, no leadership, and a lack of organizational structure due to their place at the bottom of the economic scale; whose energies are entirely consumed by the struggle for survival. The reason why Roma are overlooked is because they are completely irrelevant to the explicit and implicit goals of the Western Powers, whereas the other groups of "political refugees" support, encourage, and embrace the Westernization of the former Yugoslavia.

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