December 03, 1997;

HEADLINE: Vatican has gold wrested from Gypsy victims, delegate claims With BC- Nazi Gold Conference

BYLINE: MAUREEN JOHNSON, Associated Press

DATELINE: LONDON

Gold coins and rings worth nearly dlrs 2 million wrested from Gypsies killed in a concentration camp in Croatia, a puppet state of the Nazis, were sent to the Vatican, a delegation at a conference on Nazi gold contended Wednesday.

Pressing for compensation for a people some see as the forgotten victims of the Holocaust, the Romani delegation is seeking a total of about 135 million dollars. That is the claimed value of all the gold taken from an estimated 250,000 Gypsies murdered during World War II.

Many were nomads, and none had bank accounts.

''They took all their money with them. They thought they were being resettled no one ever told them they were going to concentration camps,'' said Donald Kenrick, leader of the International Romani Union delegation. ''We would like that money back but not as blood money. That is not the Gypsy way.''

Kenrick, a British academic of Polish Jewish descent, said the information that gold belonging to 28,000 Gypsies killed at the Jasenovic concentration camp in Croatia wound up in the Vatican comes from the head of the International Romani Union, Rajko Djusic.

But Kenrick could produce no evidence or cite documentation.

Djusic, a Serb Gypsy now living in Germany, is not attending the London conference because he does not have the proper travel documents, he said.

The Vatican, criticized for failing to expose evidence of Nazi atrocities during World War II and reluctant to open its archives, refuses to make any public statement at the three-day conference.

Its delegation, headed by Monsignor Giovanni d'Aniello, switched from participant to observer status at the last minute.

Kenrick estimates that 250,000 of the 1 million Gypsies living in countries occupied by the Nazis in World War II were killed in concentration camps.

He contended that Catholic priests helped run the Jasaenovic camp, and the Gypsy gold was sent to the Vatican by the Ustashi, a Fascist party then in charge of the mainly Catholic country.

Ian Hancock, the deputy head of the Romani Union, noted that research into the scale of atrocities against Gypsies is still scant, but said recognition is growing now that, along with Jews, they were singled out for extermination on racial grounds.

So far, Kenrick said, a handful of Gypsies who survived in Germany have received compensation from the German government.

The Romani Union wants the dlrs 135 million it is seeking from the Allies' Tripartite Gold Commission distributed quickly among 100,000 aging survivors.

''All are old, many are ill and we would like them to live out their lives decently with pensions,'' Kenrick said.

The rest of the money, he said, would be used to establish a foundation to conteract current prejudice against Gypsies, particularly in Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria.