A Roma family in Dublin, Ireland has been reunited with a seven-year old girl after DNA tests proved the kid is indeed their daughter.  What appears to be a Garda mistake and other incidents in Europe has the Roma community on edge, fearing “witch hunts”.

The family is supporting calls from the Irish Travelers human rights group Pavee Point for an independent investigation into why the girl was removed from their custody in the first place.  She is said to have been traumatized by Irish police forcibly removing her from her family on the whim of a complainant who didn’t think she looked enough like her parents.  The reuniting of that family comes after a second child taken from yet another Roma family in the village of Athlone has been returned to them.

The cases were enflamed because of the story of little Maria in Greece:  The little blond haired, blue-eyed girl was taken from her Roma family after DNA tests didn’t match up and the parents couldn’t come up with any paperwork explaining why they had custody.  They now claim that a friend, a Bulgarian Roma prostitute who was unable to care for a child, gave the girl to them.  Interpol is asking member nations for lists of missing children, after the crime-fighting organization’s first attempt to establish the child’s origins through DNA matching failed.

Throughout Europe, Roma have long been scapegoated and shunned, and the Greek case only enflamed entrenched stereotypes of child-snatching.  Reports have already emerged of fascist skinheads attacking a Roma family in Serbia, because the child had lighter skin than the parents.

“This is a perfect excuse for many to intensify collective blame for Roma,” said Zeljko Jovanovic, director of the Open Society Foundation’s Roma Initiatives Office in Hungary, another country where right-wing extremists were already increasing harassment and attacks on Roma.