PRAGUE (Reuters) - Czechs will not require a visa to enter Britain in the near future, but need to encourage their gypsy population to stay at home, British junior Home Office Minister Mike O`Brien said on Tuesday. During a visit focusing on the 1998 influx of Czech and Slovak gypsy asylum seekers in Britain - which led to a visa requirement for Slovak citizens late last year - O`Brien said he found that most were fleeing poverty not persecution. He said that while many more gypsy asylum seekers had come from neighbouring Slovakia, thus triggering the re-imposition of visas on Slovaks, Britain reserved the right to revive visas for Czechs if there were a renewed influx from this country. "So I say to the Czech people, `Please help deal with the Roma (gypsy) problem and move forward with us in Europe,` he said at a news conference with Czech Foreign Minister Jan Kavan. O`Brien, who stressed that Britain strongly supported Czech membership of the European Union, said he was confident the new Social Democratic government would do all it could to discourage discrimination. However, he described his visit to a gypsy neighbourhood in the second city Brno as

"heart rending" for the squalor and poor housing. He said more was needed to be done to make the minority population feel they had a chance for a decent life at home. O`Brien strongly criticised a plan by the northern city of Usti nad Labem to erect a wall to separate a gypsy block of flats from the rest of the surrounding neighbourhood, but he praised President Vaclav Havel for speaking out firmly against the project in his New Year`s speech. "Talk of walls is unacceptable," O`Brien said. Kavan

said he believed the wall would never be built, but that if the town council persisted the government would intervene. Kavan, who lived as a dissident in Britain for several years before the 1989 democratic revolution in Prague, said several plans to address the problem, such as an exchange of Czech and British local government officials from multi-cultural areas, were in the works. But he said that it would be hard to change the attitudes of Czechs which had developed over several generations in a mostly homogeneous society.