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Samuels quoted excerpts of articles where Kalin Rumenov (picture) compared the gypsies to "cattle" and said they were "multiplying like sheep."
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SOFIA (AFP-EJP)---The Simon Wiesenthal Centre called Tuesday on Bulgaria's president to withdraw a journalism prize awarded to a columnist it says compared gypsies to animals.
A statement from the Jewish human rights organisation's director for international relations, Shimon Samuels, protested the country's choice of recipient for its 2008 Chernorizetz Hrabar journalistic award.
"The laureate, Kalin Rumenov, is reported to have written racist articles on a regular basis, attacking the Roma Gypsy community in the national newspaper Novinar," Samuels said, urging President Georgy Parvanov to withdraw the prize.
The newspaper was not immediately available to comment but Samuels quoted excerpts of articles where Rumenov compared the gypsies to "cattle" and said they were "multiplying like sheep."
"This language is so redolent of the 1930s and 1940s when both Jews and Gypsies were marked for Nazi extermination," Samuels said.
The award was received by Kalin Rumenov at an official ceremony in Sofia in May in the presence of leading politicians, members of Parliament and journalists.
Several Bulgarian professional groups set up a petition for the prize to be publicly withdrawn, calling on the President and the Prime Minister of Bulgaria, who were present at the ceremony, to make a public declaration that they do not share the values represented by the racist author.
An estimated 700,000 gypsies or Roma live in Bulgaria, forming nine percent of the country's population. The community is poverty-ridden and isolated in ghettos, largely illiterate and often discriminated.