I believe it was reprehensible to include the AP article about the Romani woman who left her daughter with another Romani group in Greece.

Failing to consider that “news coverage [is] fueling racist sentiments against the Gypsy minority” (last paragraph), the editors have turned our local newspaper into a platform for those who would promote ethnic cleansing of this group through misinformation and fear.

Worse, you have missed the point. Greek police raided a Romani settlement; (what justified a government raiding an ethnic community? Is this the seed of another pogrom like before World War II in which the Greeks participated to eliminate the Romani?) The police “discovered” “a blond-haired and fair-skinned girl” (read: racist assumption that Romanis are only dark skinned and therefore must have abducted the child).

If that wasn’t bad enough, the mere “discovery” justified the removal and placing of the child in “a children’s charity.”

Mainers should be particularly sensitive about this as we mark the first year of the establishment of the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up to listen to what happened to the children of the Wabanaki people during the past 50-plus years. As late as the 1990s, Wabanaki children were removed forcibly from their families and placed with non-Native families under the ethnic-cleansing type policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Nationally, 25 percent of Native children were removed from their families as part of a social experiment. (www.mainewabanakitrc.org)

Please help educate us about the abuse and ethnic cleansing of people in Maine and around the world and avoid reprinting tabloid reports that promote fear to justify these horrific practices.

Holly WeidnerMonmouth

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