Czech Gypsies, the 'inadaptable people'

national | miscellaneous | news report Tuesday August 06, 2002 16:17 by Angus Bancroft

A computer game called Kill Yourself a Gypsy appeared in early 2000. It began to circulate not long after a wall was built in Maticni Street, in the Czech town of Usti nad Labem. The wall was built to separate Roma (Gypiesy) from their "white" Czech neighbours. In the game the player has to shoot at Gypsies who appear on the screen while adding blocks to the wall. The game was of a piece with the casual racism against Roma that pervades the post-communist Czech Republic.

Roma in the Czech Republic
Roma in 14th century Bohemia carried out many functions valuable to the feudal lords of the Czech Lands, working as blacksmiths, soldiers and so on. Anti-Gypsy legislation was passed in Moravia in 1538. Following the Turkish conquest of central Hungary, Roma were targeted as Turkish spies and murdered by local mobs. The situation calmed down somewhat following Maria-Theresa's accession to the Austro-Hungarian throne in the 18th century. The Roma then became the objects of a reformatory policy instituted by her government, a policy that was designed to end their nomadic way of life and assimilate them into the settled population, by force if necessary. Many had their children removed from them.

After the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918 the Roma gained citizenship and recognition as a national minority, but theirs was a brief respite.

Dark clouds began to gather with the revival of anti-nomadism ordinances in 1927. An anti-Roma pogrom in Pobedim, Slovakia, in 1928 was one instance of the worsening of relations between Roma and their Czechoslovak neighbours. The newspaper Slovak commented that "the Pobedim case can be characterised as a citizens' revolt against Gypsy life. In this there are the roots of democracy."

With the Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 the net began to close around the Czech Roma. Beginning in 1940, Czech Roma were rounded up and forced into "labour" camps along with Jews. Some were shipped to concentration camps in other countries, such as Auschwitz, others to the Czech concentration camps at Lety and Hodonin, where they were massacred. Few Czech Roma survived the war.

Most Slovak Roma escaped extermination, the Nazi puppet state subjecting them to harassment and discrimination but not, for the most part, actively participating in the genocide.

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"Right from the beginning, the Communists shoved us out to the edges of society. And woe to anyone that might want to change their label of inadaptable person." Anna Polakova, Radio Prague, 1998

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After the Second World War the Communist government forced nomadic Slovak Roma to settle in the Czech Lands. There, the Roma were put into low wage jobs to replace the Sudeten Germans, who had been expelled from the country after the war.

The Communists had a distinct social engineering aim in mind. Working as unskilled labour would help extract "social and labour conformity from Gypsies". To enforce their participation in the socialist labour system, the government passed the 1958 Act on Permanent Settlement of Nomadic People. Nomadic Roma were subject to a policy of forced settlement. Their horses were killed and their caravans destroyed. A campaign of forced sterilisation of Roma women was put in place. There was a deliberate attempt to destroy them culturally through forced assimilation, much as the Nazis had attempted to eliminate them physically through extermination.

Roma since the Velvet Revolution
It is estimated that there are currently some 275,000 Roma in the Czech Republic, 2.9% of the population. After Communism was overthrown in 1989 there was some optimism that the Roma would be able to take an accepted place in national life. It was not to be, and the Roma have paid a heavy price for democracy, in the form of discrimination, racial violence and segregation.

Discrimination
The Communist government had represented its assimilation of Roma into the labour force as a success. To them, the Roma were normalised, newly admitted to the ranks of the proletarian masses. What the government had failed to do was to tackle the anti-Roma prejudice that pervaded Czechoslovak society. Indeed its actions had if anything reinforced that prejudice by forcing many Roma into low wage and low status occupations. When the labour market was freed up after the Velvet Revolution, most Roma were thrown out of their jobs and became unemployed. Employers continue to discriminate against Roma and are not punished when they reject Roma who try to get jobs. The positions formerly held by the Roma were filled not by other Czechs but by unskilled labourers from Romania, Hungary and other parts of Eastern Europe that have suffered badly in the transition. The result is that the unemployment rate among Roma is 80%, compared to 4% for the Czech Republic as a whole.

Discrimination is pervasive in other areas of life. Roma are excluded from restaurants, bars and nightclubs. The school system is effectively segregated. Two thirds of Roma children are sent to special schools for children with learning disabilities. Of the children in these schools 75% are Roma. They are put in a sub-standard educational system and treated as intellectually deficient. Their education is severely curtailed because of this practice.

Many Czech Roma were denied citizenship of the newly formed Czech Republic under the Citizenship Law of 1993. This pushed many further to the margins of society. Many Roma living in the Czech Republic were technically considered Slovaks, having been moved there from Slovakia after the Second World War. They were not given automatic citizenship of the new Republic. To apply for it they had to leap a series of hurdles that were designed to prevent them gaining citizenship status.

Gypsy Work Brigade in Slovakia

Since the law was introduced many courts have expelled "Slovak" Roma who had never lived in Slovakia. A new law introduced in 1999 has improved things, but many Roma still do not have citizenship, and this excludes them from many rights that Czechs take as normal.

Racist violence
Since 1989 there has been a sharp upsurge in anti-Roma violence and racial abuse. There have been many high-profile attacks on Roma, and a number of racially motivated murders carried out by gangs of skinheads. Last year police recorded 364 racially motivated or extremist crimes. Many go unrecorded, due to the reluctance of police to document them. For instance, in August 1999, several Romani homes near the town of Jaromerice nad Rokytnou were attacked by 30 skinheads. For one hour the skinheads attacked the Roma while shouting racist abuse. Police charged 12 of them with various offences, such as rioting, property damage and violence. They were not charged with racially motivated crimes.

When racist crimes have been prosecuted the courts have tended to hand down lenient sentences. In 1998 a group of skinheads beat a Roma man, Milan Lacko, unconscious. They left him in the road and a lorry ran him down and killed him. Four men were prosecuted for his murder and, although found guilty, they received suspended sentences. The government has set up a number of initiatives to combat violence, but the statutes against racially motivated crime are often not enforced. There appears to be a pattern of the national government introducing measures to combat anti-Roma violence, which then are thwarted on the ground by courts and police who are reluctant to carry them through.

Racial politics became a phenomenon during the 1990s. The Republican Party of Miroslav Sladek made its platform opposition to immigration, to Germans and to Roma. It enjoyed some poll success during the 1990s but lost all its parliamentary seats in the 1998 election and has since disintegrated into infighting. The remnants have recently attempted to revive their fortunes with the formation of the National Social Bloc. Given the continued strength of the skinhead movement it still has a potentially significant base of support.

Segregation
Under Communism the Roma were assigned to old, crowded blocks of flats with inadequate services. The discrimination in housing continues, both by local authorities and private landlords. In 1998 a Czech town, Usti nad Labem, was propelled into the national and international headlines by its proposal to further extend this ghettoisation by building a wall separating one apartment block inhabited mainly by Roma from their neighbours.

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"We simply want to separate the decent people from those who are not." Ladislav Hruska, Mayor of Usti nad Labem, 1998

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Usti is a classically Soviet industrial town. With the exception of a recently repainted Baroque church, it combines rundown 19th century buildings with Stalinist concrete monstrosities. Soviet era apartment blocks are stacked up the sides of the gorge. In one of these apartment blocks on Maticni Street live 30 or 40 Roma families. City officials erected a four-metre high wall around the apartment block in October 1999. In addition there were to be 24-hour police patrols. The wall was pulled down after the local authority finally gave way to pressure from the national government. Local authorities in several other Czech towns were inspired to build their own walls separating Roma from non-Roma.

An opinion poll carried out in 1997 asked Czechs their view of Roma. Seven per cent had a sympathetic view and 69% could not tolerate them. The Czech Republic thinks of itself as the most Westernised of the former Communist states. The Roma minority is viewed as embarrassing evidence of backwardness and is not seen as Czech.

Some Roma have asserted their right to be part of the Czech nation, saying "we are Czechs". Yet many Roma do not support this slogan. They see the Czech nation as something from which they are permanently excluded.

Dr Angus Bancroft is a lecturer in Public Health, Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Edinburgh. He has worked with Gypsy-Travellers in Scotland and Wales, and Roma in the Czech Republic