A-Infos (en) Czech Republic: segregating gypsies

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  Monday, May 25, 1998

2 Czech Cities to Wall Off Their 'Problematic'
Gypsies

By Peter S. Green International Herald Tribune

USTI NAD LABEM, Czech Republic - Two Czech cities
have decided to fence in what they call
''problematic'' public housing residents, creating
what is virtually a ghetto for the residents, mainly
Gypsies, who officials say ruin the calm, orderly
life of their neighbors.

City officials say fencing in such citizens, and
guarding them with round-the-clock police patrols,
is the only sensible way to deal with people who
refuse to pay rent on their city-owned apartments,
throw garbage into the street and gather on
sidewalks talking, singing and sometimes drinking
until late in the night.

Street-side socializing may be a way of life in
Madrid, Rome or New York, but in this depressed
industrial city on the banks of the Elbe river, city
officials have agreed to spend 350,000 koruny
($10,900) to stop such behavior. They will build two
four-meter-high (13-foot) walls around a pair of
decrepit two-story apartment buildings that house 39
Gypsy families.

''The fence will separate this problematic community
from those people who have private houses on the
road,'' said Milan Knotek, spokesman for the Usti
city hall. ''The wall will not stop them from
moving about. It will not be a ghetto enclosed on
four sides.''

In fact, three fences and an abandoned building will
effectively limit access to the two buildings, on
Maticni Street in a poor, crumbling district of
Usti, and city officials have promised to maintain
their around-the-clock police patrols.

In Pilsen, the beer-brewing capital of Bohemia,
elected officials plan a fenced-in compound on the
city's outskirts for several hundred public housing
residents. Ten portable cabins will hold several
hundred residents in a dormitory setup. Residents
will be free to come and go, while a police station
inside the compound will keep a 24-hour watch. A
city-appointed warden will supervise the cabins and
grounds.

''The caretaker would have the right to enter any
room, whether the resident agrees or not,'' Petr
Cekal, a city council official, said in an interview
with the newspaper Mlada Fronta Dnes.

''This is a concentration camp,'' said Pavel Dostal,
a Social Democratic member of Parliament. He said it
was clear that the Pilsen camp would be
disproportionately filled with Roma, as Gypsies
prefer to be called, who are usually the poorest and
least educated of Czechs.

''This is how the Nazis started to 'solve' the
Jewish question,'' Mr. Dostal said. In World War II,
about 77,000 Jewish Czechs were deported by the
occupying Nazis and killed in the death camps.
Nearly all of the country's Roma population of 8,000
were also deported by the Nazis and all but 600 died
in the camps.

''This is pure racist segregation,'' Dimitrina
Petrova, executive director of the European Roma
Rights Center in Budapest. ''It's incredible. It's
totally unacceptable in a civilized democracy.''

''We have noticed for some time that the Czech
Republic seems to be the champion of racism against
Roma,'' she added.

Most of the estimated 300,000 Gypsies in the Czech
Republic today (out of a population of 10.3 million)
arrived from Slovakia after World War II. They live
in grinding poverty, trapped in a vicious circle of
poor education, teenage pregnancy, unemployment,
petty crime and alcoholism. In scenes reminiscent of
the segregation-era South of the United States, the
Roma, who tend to be darker-skinned than most
Czechs, are often denied work, housing or social
benefits simply because of their skin color.

Roma children are routinely shunted to schools for
the learning disabled, and Roma are regularly
harassed by the police and often physically attacked
by groups of skinheads. In the latest incident, a
Czech Roma died two weeks ago after he was beaten by
skinheads, then run over by a passing truck as he
lay unconscious in the street.

In Usti, the non-Gypsy residents of Maticni Street
say they are not racist, they just want to be left
alone.

Hana Chladkova, a 27-year-old insurance clerk, says
the wall was her idea. She says she just wants to
sleep at nights and let her 3-year-old son, Petr,
play in peace. Instead, she says, the noisy
neighbors, the garbage strewn around their apartment
block and the rats that come with it are too much.

''A barrier will be more aesthetic and it will keep
out the noise, the dirt and the stink,'' Mrs.
Chladkova said. ''They throw garbage out their
windows, they piss from the balconies.''

A neighbor, Alois Kaplan, showed a reporter a
videotape he had made of the Maticni housing project
in March. The yard and street were littered with
trash and a pile of garbage about a meter high and
several meters long lay moldering next to an
abandoned apartment block.

The street's Romany residents blame the city for
their problems. Several said they were illegally
resettled there, and they say the city fails to
offer the services, from hot water to garbage
pickup, that they pay for.

Gizela Kulenikova, a 36-year old Roma woman, raises
four children and cares for her disabled boyfriend,
Jozef Lacko, in a two-room apartment that has no
heat or hot water, no shower or bathtub. ''We
are free people in a free country and they want to
treat us like Red Indians in the United States,''
she said.

Jan Kocourek, the deputy mayor of the Usti district
that includes Maticni Street, defended the plan to
build a wall.

''These people have a different way of living, from
afternoon until late at night, and they create
noise,'' Mr. Kocourek said.

Asked if fencing the Gypsies into what is
effectively a ghetto might be a violation of their
civil rights, Mr. Kocourek erupted in anger.

''Rights? Are you serious? What civil rights?'' he
said. ''They can vote, but they don't. They can
work, but they don't. They can pay rent, but they
don't.''

Asked if city hall had consulted with the residents
of Maticni before deciding on the wall, he turned to
a reporter and shouted: ''You're an American. Did
you ask the Red Indians when you put them on
reservations?''


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