Complacently Sitting In Judgement

"One cannot be judge or predict any legal decisions but any claimant will have to prove that she is worthy of motherhood of the child. In this case, the biological mother abandoned her child, possibly in return for money, then fled the country."
Athens Supreme Court spokesman

"It may be that it is decided that because of the circumstances she is better off in the care of an institution."
Kostas Giannopoulos, director, Smile of the Child

"We are examining the home environment and whether the parents are in a proper position to care for their children and what special protection may be needed."
Diana Kaneva, head, social services, Nikilaevo, Bulgaria

"We couldn't afford her to keep her. I meant to return for her, but then I had two more babies. I never stopped thinking of her and I want her back."
Sasha Ruseva, mother of four-year-old "Maria"

The Canadian Press

Authorities at the Athens Supreme Court, just like the social services agencies authorities and the charity authorities are all standing in judgement, despite their assertions to the contrary. They are all claiming to be determined to do what is best for the child. They all insist the well-being of the child is uppermost in their authoritarian minds. Never acknowledging that any child is best left with family that loves the child.

The child, after all, is suspected of having been the offspring of legitimate, white Europeans, conceivably someone of whom respect is due as an upstanding member of society. Unlike the Roma, of whom it is inconceivable to imagine honour, and love and emotional need and support for their offspring that equals any felt and provided by other members of polite society.

Truthfulness offered to authorities more comfortable with their suspicions of criminality, abduction and human trafficking, along with child abandonment and child neglect, is denied, for Roma are not capable of being frankly honest, capable of holding deep emotional attachment to a child. It is more compatible with the impression that authorities, like the societies they represent, to adhere to the belief of cunning, dispassionate criminality.

An impoverished Bulgarian Roma couple, temporarily in Greece to labour in the olive fields 'abandoned' their newborn. They did not, in impoverished desperation, plead with a Greek Roma couple to take in their child, raise it as their own, love the child and offer it a future within the Roma tradition. Where Roma are concerned those who detest them -- and they are legion -- prefer to imagine filthy lucre changing hands in a corrupt human society.

The Bulgarian Roma mother, Sasha Ruseva, desperately explaining she had no option but to leave her baby in Greece, unable to afford to take her back to Bulgaria. "She is my own flesh and blood", she stated, and she would like now to regain custody of her child, one of ten she has given birth to. And, unsurprisingly, the Greek Roma couple to whom the child was turned over, loving her, plan to seek legal custody.

Charged with child abduction, Christos Salis, 39, and Eleftheria Dimopoulou, 40, raised little "Maria" with their other five children, equally loving and supportive to the best of their diminished abilities in a society within a Continent that oppresses and degrades the lives of Roma, denying them employment, equality in education, forcing them to live demeaned lives of squalor and need.

But there are in any society, those among whom human rights are considered sacred and who are prepared to do battle on behalf of those denied those rights. Lawyers acting on behalf of the incarcerated Greek couple stated their determination to apply for the immediate release of their (pro bono) clients, and then custody claims will proceed.

In Bulgaria, social workers there know that the parents of the ten Bulgarian Roma children must manage on welfare benefits amounting to roughly $70 monthly. Their concern, they claim, is the welfare of the children. When social workers become concerned about the "welfare" of children living in disadvantaged circumstances, it is usually a prelude to taking custody from the biological parents and giving their children over to the kindly auspices of the state.

"We are examining the home environment and whether the parents are in a proper position to care for their children and what special protection may be needed", said Diana Kaneva, head of social services for the Nikilaevo region, speaking of the emergency review of the Ruseva family that had been initiated.