BBC to axe Gypsy and Traveller radio programming

Rokker Radio, the two-hour radio programme established two years ago by BBC for the Gypsy and Traveller community is to be axed at the end of April.

As the show prepares to celebrate two years of broadcasting across the East of England, the BBC has decided not to fund the programme beyond the end of April.

The programme began on BBC Three Counties Radio on Romany Nation Day in 2006 and has since grown to broadcast on six local radio stations across the East of England.

Each Sunday night, between 7 and 9pm it broadcasts to Britain's 300,000 Gypsies and Travellers, many of whom must drive long distances to hear it because they cannot receive it in their area or listen to it on the internet.

Over the last two years, BBC Rokker Radio has attempted to address a perceived lack of proper representation of Europe's largest ethnic minority community in the media in Britain.

It has raised issues of importance to the community whilst literally providing a common wavelength through which Gypsy and settled communities can begin to understand one another.

With just one month before Gypsy and Traveller broadcasting is silenced in Britain, Gypsy and Traveller journalists, campaigners and Traveller education advocates have launched a campaign to save and expand the programme.

In an open letter to BBC Director General Mark Thompson, members of the European Romani Journalists Federation have started to campaign for equal representation on and within the BBC. 

Veteran Kosovan Roma journalist Orhan Galjus said: "The BBC should begin the process of dedicating the same level of resources to the Gypsy and Traveller community as it does to other ethnic and linguistic minorities in Britain.

"If it is right that the BBC broadcasts in Welsh and Gaelic and provides an entire network to the Asian community, it is also right that it provide the same commitment to Europe's largest ethnic minority community, the Romany people.

"Services in the Romani language are also badly needed to support and inform those communities who currently have no access to independent broadcasting.

"Across many parts of Europe a de facto apartheid blights the Romany community and its prospects. We urgently need the BBC's help to inform and educate our 12 million strong European nation."

In an attempt to save the programme, campaigners have set up an online petition to demonstrate the support there is for the programme. It can be signed and viewed online at: www.petitiononline.com/rokker08/petition.html