Cover of Swiss Magazine Draws Accusations of Racism A Swiss weekly magazine aimed to draw attention to what it presented as the scourge of robberies in Switzerland with a provocative cover of a young, dirty-faced boy pointing a gun at the camera and the headline "The Roma are coming." It succeeded in being called racist. The cover, on the German-language magazine Die Weltwoche, unleashed a flood of criticism in Switzerland, Austria and Germany over what many saw as race-based fear-mongering. After the magazine appeared last Thursday, several problems emerged over the weekend with the image itself, deepening the disapproval. For one thing, the picture is several years old, the German daily newspaper Der Spiegel reported. Also, the gun is a toy, and the boy was photographed playing at a garbage dump in Kosovo. The original appeared as part of a September 2008 series by the Italian photographer Livio Mancini, who shot Roma children as they played in a slum built on a dump. A caption published with the series said children's families "survive by sorting through and selling recyclable trash. Neither Kosovar or Serbian, this ethnic group has always been shunned. Despite that, the magazine's deputy editor in chief Philipp Gut and an author of the article in question has defended the cover, including in a video message posted on Monday. He said that the image was an accurate illustration of a real problem. "Roma gangs misuse their children for criminal purposes," he said, according to a translation of his remarks in The Local, an English-language Swiss news site. The real scandal is that none of those who are outraged are doing anything about this abuse. The site added that Switzerland's Federal Commission Against Racism had received complaints about the cover and was investigating whether it had violated the country's antiracism laws. In Germany, advocates for the Roma population there have filed a criminal complaint for racial incitement, Der Spiegel reported. There are roughly 10 million to 12 million Roma, also known as Gypsies, living in the European Union, where they face prejudice and discrimination, the European Commission has said. According to a translation by the BBC, the Weltwoche article suggested that "Roma families from Eastern Europe are responsible for a large part of the increasing crime tourism" and added, "They come, they steal and they go."