“Normally, the number is zero,” chargé d’affaires Terrance Mooney told Maclean’s. By the middle of last week, 350 people a day were calling the Canadian Embassy in Prague to ask about seeking asylum. The plight of the Czech Republic’s estimated 300,000 Romanis was dramatized for Canadians last week when immigration inquiries suddenly skyrocketed in the wake of a documentary about Canada’s refugee process that was broadcast on Czech television on Aug. “Many firms make it a stated policy not to hire them.” “They are overtly discriminated against,” says Prague human rights worker Jud Nirenberg. Hitler’s Germany exterminated 500,000 during the Second World War, leading politically sensitive postwar Europeans to use only the formal terms “Roma” and 'Sinti”-never the more derogatory “Gypsy.” In Prague the polite term is Romani-although not everyone uses it. They have lived in poverty at the margins of society and have long been persecuted as vagrants and criminals. Originally from India, the Gypsies number about 12 million worldwide, and migrated to Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages. “I assumed they wouldn’t want to look at me because I am dark-skinned.” Instead, she went to a refugee shelter and heard about Kubes, who later filed her claim.īanomova’s fear of white officials came from a lifetime of prejudice that she has endured as a member of the stateless Roma and Sinti nation-known throughout the world as Gypsies. “They were white,” she recalls, sitting in the Toronto office of immigration lawyer George Kubes.

She arrived in May as a visitor at Pearson International Airport, intending to claim refugee status, but backed down when she faced Canada Customs officials. It was then that she decided to start a new life in Canada, a country she perceived as “a land of peace.” Banomova sold her gold necklace and other belongings for a plane ticket to Toronto. Eventually, the battered 25-year-old student made her way back to her home in the northwestern Czech town of Usti nad Labem to nurse her cuts and bruises.

As she rolled on the dirty floor of a Prague train station last November, fending off blows from neo-Nazi skinheads, Karolina Banomova cried out for help.

Kubes smichova