BRUSSELS: The European Commission yesterday reprimanded the head of its office in Slovakia for suggesting in a television interview that Roma children should be sent away to boarding school from Monday morning to Friday evening to learn the norms of Slovak society.
The official suggested that parents might have to be given financial incentives to agree to this.
The remarks embarrassed the Commission, which has been trying for years to get successive Slovak governments to respect and protect the rights of its minority Roma population.
Groups campaigning for the rights of Roma people protested to the president of the European Commission, Mr Romano Prodi, about the interview broadcast on Dutch television during a programme to mark the enlargement of the European Union.
Mr Eric Van der Linden, a Dutchman, a long-time official in the European Commission and now head of the Commission's office in Bratislava, said in the interview: "At the root of the problem, I believe, we must strengthen education and must organise education in such a way that we perhaps should start to, so to speak, 'force' Roma children to stay from Monday morning to Friday evening in a sort of boarding school, where they would be permanently subject to a value-system that is normal in our society."
Asked whether the Roma were likely to accept having their children taken away, Mr Van der Linden, answered: "I don't think that they will accept that so easily. And ultimately we live here in a democracy, so naturally you can't force that, but you can of course try to persuade people with monetary incentives to develop it more smoothly."
The interview was condemned by the European Roma Information Office in Brussels, which recalled that during the Habsburg empire, Roma children had been removed from their families and brought up by non-Roma.
Mr Prodi's spokesman, Mr Reijo Kemppinen, said yesterday that Mr Van der Linden would no longer be giving interviews on the topic of the Roma.