„Drei von vier Familien, die ein Kind adoptieren wollen, lehnen Roma-Kinder von vornherein ab“, bedauert România liberă und bezieht sich dabei auf die Statistiken der Nationalen Adoptionsbehörde für 2012.

Rumänen, die „Vorurteile überwinden“, sind der Ausnahmefall. Einer davon schmückt die Titelseite der Tageszeitung: Eine Lehrerin, die sich neben ihrer „dunkelhäutigeren“ Tochter fotografieren ließ. „Rumänen sind Rassisten“, gibt ein Pfarrer offen zu, der zwei Roma-Kinder adoptiert hat.

Für diese anhaltenden Vorurteile sind die „Bildungsmängel“ verantwortlich, erklärt die Psychologin der rumänischen Adoptionsbehörde, Cristina Neacşu, gegenüber der Tageszeitung. Ihren Erklärungen zufolge haben Familien, die adoptieren wollen, alle Vorurteile. Daraufhin erklären wir ihnen, dass es keinerlei Gene für Kriminalität oder Aggressivität gibt. Andere befürchten wiederum, dass das betroffene Kind gebrandmarkt sein könnte. Von den 1.222 Familien, denen 2012 genehmigt wurde, ein Kind zu adoptieren, hatten 875 schriftlich erklärt, dass sie nur „rumänische Kinder kennenlernen“ möchten und „jede andere Ethnie ausschließen“. „Statistiken zufolge ziehen Rumänen es vor, jahrelang darauf zu warten, dass der Staat ein passendes Kind ausfindig macht, anstatt ein minderjähriges Roma-Kind zu adoptieren“, fügt România liberă hinzu.

Quelle: presseurop
Stand: 10.05.2013

Kein Grund für eine Anklage wegen Volksverhetzung: Die Roma-feindlichen Äußerungen des Bremer Abgeordneten Martin Korol fallen laut Staatsanwaltschaft unter die Meinungsfreiheit. Dass die Justiz auch mit der NPD milde umgeht, stößt auf Kritik.

Der 68-jährige SPD-Bürgerschaftsabgeordnete Korol hatte vor seinem Landtagseinzug einen Text über Roma-Zuwanderer aus Südosteuropa auf seine Homepage gestellt. Darin behauptete er, Roma und Sinti lebten „sozial und intellektuell noch im Mittelalter“; ihre Männer hätten keine Hemmungen, „die Kinder zum Anschaffen statt zur Schule zu schicken“ und „ihren Frauen die Zähne auszuschlagen“.

Als lokale und überregionale Medien über seine Äußerungen berichteten, begann die Staatsanwaltschaft zu prüfen, ob sie wegen Volksverhetzung ermitteln müsse. Inzwischen steht das Ergebnis fest: Die Behörde sieht keinen Grund für ein förmliches Ermittlungsverfahren. Oberstaatsanwalt Frank Passade sagte dazu auf Nachfrage der Frankfurter Rundschau, Korols Äußerungen seien zwar überspitzt, aber durch die Meinungsfreiheit gedeckt. Dadurch werde nicht die Menschenwürde der Betroffenen angegriffen oder zum Hass gegen sie aufgestachelt, wie es für den Straftatbestand der Volksverhetzung nötig wäre.

Korol, katholischer Deutsch- und Geschichtslehrer i.R., hatte auch den „Massenmord der Abtreibungen“ und den „Wahn der sog. Selbstverwirklichung der Frau“ beklagt. Diese Äußerungen wurden von der Staatsanwaltschaft nicht geprüft, würden aber nach Ansicht Passades ebenfalls unter die Meinungsfreiheit fallen.

Wegen seiner Roma- und frauenfeindlichen Äußerungen wurde Korol inzwischen aus der SPD-Fraktion ausgeschlossen. Er sitzt derzeit als sozialdemokratischer Einzelabgeordneter im Bremer Parlament. Die SPD führt aber auch ein Parteiordnungsverfahren gegen ihn. Der Landesvorstand hofft darauf, dass die parteiinterne Schiedskommission Korol ausschließt.

Der Abgeordnete hat die umstrittenen Texte mittlerweile von seiner Homepage entfernt und sich für die Roma-Äußerungen öffentlich entschuldigt.

Inzwischen wurde Kritik an einer anderen Entscheidung der Bremer Justiz laut: Am Montag hatte das Amtsgericht Bremerhaven mit Zustimmung der Bremer Staatsanwaltschaft beschlossen, ein Volksverhetzungs-Verfahren gegen drei NPD-Bundesvorstandsmitglieder wegen geringer Schuld einzustellen; als Auflage müssen die Funktionäre jeweils 500 Euro zahlen. Die drei sollen ein ausländerfeindliches Online-Spiel verantwortet haben, einem von ihnen wurde außerdem ein ausländerfeindlicher und antisemitischer Offener Brief angelastet. Die Bürgerschaftsfraktion der Linken sprach am Dienstag von einem „Übereinkommen zwischen Nazis und Staatsanwaltschaft“ und kritisierte: „Die Justiz hat damit für Nazi-Hetze den Weg frei gemacht.“

Quelle: Frankfurter Rundschau
Stand: 07.05.2013

Marika Schmiedt, one of the most politically engaged Roma activist artists in Austria (and Europe), has been censored, threatened, and attacked for her politically controversial artworks, which expose and critique various forms of racism, nationalism and fascism in Europe. By linking the history of the persecution and killings of Roma and Sinti to the current forms of systematic and violent discrimination and murder of Roma and Sinti in Europe and worldwide, Schmiedt’s work has hit a nerve in the neo-fascist atmosphere of European politics, enraging nationalists from various countries, as well as politicians, intellectuals, and activists who find her work too confrontational.

Source: Marika Schmiedt
Date: 18.04.2013

Among the many reasons of concern about the political, economic and social crisis affecting the European Union’s civil society today, there is one that in our view has reached a critical level. We are very concerned about the re-establishment and re-legitimization of far-right parties in Eastern and Central Europe. We are also very concerned about the involvement of the far-right parties in present dynamics of society, about the participation of the far-right parties and fractions in the official decision-making processes of the political scene, along with the presence of the radical right-wing extremists within daily life under the protection of the authorities.

In the last years, there were many attacks and mobs against Roma people all over Europe; just to recall some of them, the mobs and pogroms against Roma in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Hungary from 2011 until today. Despite of the international critics and counter demonstrations, the far-right parties and fractions are still legal and their presence within public spaces is much stronger now than it was before. The legislation of the E.U. is not prepared to face this situation and unfortunately there is no interest from the side of political representatives to fight this volatile situation. Slowly but surely, the European Union turns into a ‘Europe of Nations’ in which minorities are neither respected nor protected.

There are declarations that officially dehumanize minorities: Zolt Bayer, a Hungarian official and a friend of Viktor Orban, declared at the beginning of this year: “Gypsies are animals”. The public opinion has a passive position that legitimates and empowers the far-right. Because of the lack of critics, the structure of the neo-nationalist parties and fractions has become stable and effective. Their strengthened mobs are now much more prepared and – with the support of media platforms that control and filter the information – less visible.

The far-right extremists are not just acting within the borders of their countries. The opening of the exhibition, “Thoughts are free – Anxiety is Reality for Roma in EUrope” by Marika Schmiedt, at the construction fence in Linz, Austria, on the 14th of April, 2013, triggered hatred and violence by an officially-certified tour guide from Austria Guides, Beate Hofstadler, and her Austrian husband. Before the opening, a collage was torn down and the artist was threatened, repeatedly insulted and her phone was torn out of her hands. After two days and three hours, the whole exhibition had vanished. The police had removed the artworks because a journalist had pressed charges and because of an evaluation by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which claimed: “these are racist images”. The name of the journalist is not specified in the statement of the police published in the newspaper Der Standard. We ask ourselves why? Based on this procedure, one of the most committed Roma artists in Europe was attacked and censured.

We consider this attack to be a brutal violation of the freedom of speech. The accusations made against an artist and activist in order to intimidate her, along with all the potential critics of the far-right in Hungary, represent a very dangerous form of political censorship.

Marika Schmiedt’s artworks are a direct critique of the situation that Roma people in Hungary are facing day by day. The decision made by the city of Linz to cancel the exhibition is illegal. Any kind of accusation of racism made against an artist who criticizes racism and discrimination is a contradiction in terms and cannot be sustained by laws. When an institution forbids the right to criticize nationalism and discrimination, then this institution affirms and protects the values of nationalism and supports discrimination.

We ask for immediate reparation and reconsideration of Marika Schmiedt as an artist and activist.

We ask for an immediate and official apology to Marika Schmiedt made by Beate Hofstadler, the city of Linz and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Austria.

We ask for immediate condemnation of the hate speech against Roma people in Hungary and all over the European Union.

We ask for immediate guarantee of the equal rights and protection of Roma people in Hungary and all over the European Union.

We ask for immediate and permanent condemnation of the far-right parties and fractions that promote racist ideologies and hierarchical ethnicization of civil society.

The far-right represents a danger for all the people and for the stability and freedom of civil society as a whole. There is one way to fight racism and xenophobia: to forbid them by law.

We ask civil society to stand up against the alarming rise of neo-nationalism in public life.

With kind regards,

Der Paria

With many thanks to Jasmina Tumbas for translation support!

Get active (further Information in german and english)

Yesterday’s attempted march against Romani people in the Předlice quarter of Ústí nad Labem can be described as an enormous fiasco. The demonstration, convened by Josef Bareš on the 124th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth, was attended by one person. However, it has cost the state and the taxpayers no small amount of money, as about 70 police officers were deployed to the radical event.

„Police measures are necessary, you never know if it might be a pretext for something else,” one of the police officers present told the Ústí regional daily. “It can always happen that suddenly one or two busloads of radicals show up.”

The organizer called the demonstration a “March against Inadaptables” (Pochod proti nepřizpůsobivým). The announcement to the local government lists the place of the demonstration as Předlice. According to a Facebook invitation featuring the logo of the Workers’ Social Justice Party (Dělnická strana sociální spravedlnosti – DSSS) and many crude expressions, the event was supposed to have started at 13:00 at the Západní train station and was supposed to have passed through Tovární and Hrbovická streets to Školní square and back before ending at 14:30. In reality the event ended after just 15 minutes and only Bareš was there.

In his announcement of the event to the local government, Bareš expected 100 – 120 participants to attend. However, only one person confirmed his attendance on Facebook prior to the event, and even he did not show up, leaving Bareš alone at the scene.

The Konexe civic association is criticizing the relevant town representatives for not informing the residents of Předlice about the planned march with sufficient advance notice. „The town of Ústí nad Labem has once against chosen a maximally paternalistic strategy. The town leader decided not to inform the Romani residents of Předlice, the targets of this hate march, that it would be happening – why scare Romani people unnecessarily in advance when they won’t understand it anyway? The result of this is that trust in the town leadership and majority-society institutions has fallen to an historic low in Předlice,” representatives of Konexe said.

„The Romani community did not find out about this march until Friday evening. Local residents did not have enough time to decide what to do should anti-Romani demonstrators show up in front of their buildings. At moments of time pressure and great stress, advocates of short-sighted solutions and hotheads often gain the upper hand,” Miroslav Brož of Konexe told news server Romea.cz. „If the relevant authorities had the information that very few people would be attending the march, they should have shared that information with the residents. The situation would not have been as stressful for them as it was with no information.”

Source: Romea.cz
Date: 21.04.2013

Warnung vor einer angeblichen Gefährdung des sozialen Friedens – Fakten hat die Bundesregierung keine

Mit der Warnung vor »Armutszuwanderern« schürt die Bundesregierung Vorurteile gegenüber rumänischen und bulgarischen Migranten. Dass es dafür keine Belege gibt, musste sie nun selbst zugeben.

Eine »Beleidigung für den gesunden Menschenverstand« sei es, Migranten die selben Sozialleistungen zu gewähren wie »einheimischen Staatsbürgern.« Ausreisen sollen »Personen, die Sozialleistungen betrügerisch in Anspruch nehmen«. Die Aussagen stammen von Innenminister Hans-Peter Friedrich (CSU). Wahlkampf auf dem Rücken von Migranten und das Schüren von Fremdenfeindlichkeit warfen ihm Migrantenverbände deshalb vor. Nun muss die Bundesregierung einräumen, dass hinter dem Phänomen »Armutsmigration« vieles steckt, nur keine Fakten.

Man teile »die Auffassung, dass es sich bei der Zuwanderung aus Rumänien und Bulgarien nicht in erster Linie um sogenannte ›Armutsmigration‹ handelt.« So lautet der überraschendste Satz in der Antwort der Bundesregierung auf eine »Kleine Anfrage« der LINKEN-Abgeordneten Ulla Jelpke. Statistische Belege für einen »erheblichen Anstieg der Arbeitslosigkeit von rumänischen und bulgarischen Staatsangehörigen« gebe es nicht.

Spätestens seit Beginn dieses Jahres, als der deutsche Städtetag in einem dramatischen Appell vor der »Gefährdung des sozialen Friedens« durch »Armutszuwanderung« warnte, ist die Abwehr südosteuropäischen Migranten für Unionsparteien Wahlkampfthema: In einem Brief an den EU-Ratspräsidenten forderte Minister Friedrich vor einem Monat zu Maßnahmen auf, »um den Folgen dieser Art von Einwanderung zu begegnen.« Mehr noch: »Armutszuwanderung« bedrohe »unser gemeinsames Ziel, die Mobilität der europäischen Bürger zu fördern«, schrieb Friedrich gemeinsam mit Amtskollegen aus Österreich, Großbritannien und den Niederlanden. Die Forderung für ein Treffen im Juni: Einschränkung der EU-Freizügigkeitsrichtlinie

Doch selbst Vertretern der EU geht Friedrichs Demagogie zu weit. Es gebe keinen »Sozialleistungs-Tourismus«, sah sich unlängst EU-Sozialkommissar László Andor genötigt klarzustellen und attestierte »manchen Mitgliedsstaaten« ein »Wahrnehmungsproblem«.

Dieses belegt nun auch die Antwort der Bundesregierung. Nicht nur südosteuropäische Migranten, sondern vor allem der deutsche Steuerhaushalt profitiert demnach von der gescholtenen EU-Freizügigkeitsrichtlinie: So befanden sich im Dezember 2012 fast 110 000 sozialversicherungspflichtige rumänische und bulgarische Staatsbürger in Deutschland. Die Arbeitslosenquote befand sich hingegen mit 9,6 Prozent deutlich unter dem Durchschnitt nicht-deutscher Arbeitssuchender.

»Friedrich kann nichts beweisen, er kann nur Stimmung machen«, kommentiert deshalb die innenpolitische Sprecherin der Linksfraktion Jelpke. Auch der Vorsitzende des Zentralrates der Sinti und Roma, Romani Rose, weist in einer Erklärung darauf hin, dass nicht deutsche Steuerzahler die maßgeblichen Opfer der Debatte sind. Mehrere »aggressive Demonstrationen vor Häusern, in den Roma-Familien leben«, habe es bereits durch rechtsextreme Gruppen gegeben. Dies müsse auch den Parteien für die bevorstehende heiße Phase des Wahlkampfes bewusst sein.

Quelle: Neues Deutschland
Stand: 10.05.2013

„Freiwillige Ausreisen“ sind nichts anderes als indirekte Abschiebungen…
Alle Abschiebungen stoppen!
SOLIDARITÄT JETZT!
DEMONSTRATION 20. April 2013 | 14 Uhr | FREIBURG | Johanneskirche

Baden-Württemberg schiebt ab – allen grün-roten Lippenbekenntnissen zu einer humaneren Flüchtlingspolitik zum Trotz. 2012 wurden aus Baden-Württemberg 763 Menschen abgeschoben. Ein zwischenzeitiger Abschiebestopp für Familien mit minderjährigen Kindern endete am 20. März diesen Jahres: Nun leben Menschen, die auch schon seit langer Zeit hier wohnen wieder in ständiger Angst, die Region in eine unsichere Zukunft verlassen zu müssen.

Die Lebensbedingungen für hier lebende Flüchtlinge sind katastrophal. Die Bewegungsfreiheit wird besonders für Geduldetedurch die sogenannte „Residenzpflicht“ massiv eingeschränkt, oft werden nur Sach- statt Geldleistungen gewährt und in den Flüchtlingslagern hat jeder Mensch derzeit 4,5 m² zur Verfügung. Wer sich dagegen wehrt, dem drohen Repression und körperliche Übergriffe – wie bei der Refugee-Bustour im März, wo es in Karlsruhe, Köln und weiteren Städten zu Festnahmen und Prügelattacken durch die Polizei kam. Wie schlecht die Lebensbedingungen für Flüchtlinge sind, beweisen auch die aktuellen Flüchtlingsproteste in mehreren baden-württembergischen Städten, z.B. in Freudenstadt, Heidenheim und Künzelsau.

Die grün-rote Landesregierung erhöht den Druck: So werden vom Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge Asylanträge aus den Balkanstaaten routinemäßig abgelehnt, die Ausgabe von Duldungen wird als Druckmittel eingesetzt. Das Regierungspräsidium Karlsruhe als zentrale baden-württembergische Abschiebebehörde gab unter anderem ein „Hinweisblatt“ heraus, auf dem Flüchtlinge ankreuzen sollen, ob sie „bereit sind freiwillig auszureisen“ – oft ohne Übersetzung. Obwohl diese Angabe rechtlich nicht erforderlich ist, erweckte die Ausländerbehörde mehrfach den Anschein, dass die verlängerte Duldung erst nach einer Unterschrift ausgehändigt würde. So werden zahlreiche Familien mit bürokratischen Schikanen und psychischem Druck von den Ausländerbehörden bewusst zu einer sogenannten „freiwilligen Ausreise“ gedrängt. Diese erfolgt alles andere als freiwillig: Alternativ droht die zwangsweise Abschiebung und damit ein fünfjähriges Einreiseverbot für den ganzen Schengen-Raum. Die „freiwillige Ausreise“ ist faktisch nichts anderes als eine indirekte Abschiebung, was von den politisch Verantwortlichen auch noch als „humane Flüchtlingspolitik“ verkauft wird.

Mit der sehr engen Auslegung des Asylrechts wird Deutschland der Situation von Flüchtigen nicht gerecht. Wer es bis nach Deutschland schafft, hat wenig Chancen auf Schutz. Nach dem Dublin-II-Abkommen werden Menschen direkt dahin abgeschoben, wo sie die EU-Grenzen übertraten. Die dortige Situation interessiert deutsche Behörden in keiner Weise: Kürzlich sah sich sogar das Verwaltungsgericht Meiningen dazu veranlasst, eine Abschiebung nach Ungarn aufgrund der dortigen Verhältnisse zu stoppen. So wird in Ungarn offen gegen Roma gehetzt und offizielle Staatspreise an Menschen vergeben, die Roma als „Affenmenschen“ bezeichnen. Alles kein Abschiebehindernis für den deutschen Staat, genauso wie die unmenschlichen Zustände, vor denen Menschen fliehen und welche ein direktes Produkt von wirtschaftlicher Ausbeutung und ungleichen Machtverhältnissen sind. Somit ist die Unterscheidung zwischen „wirtschaftlichen“ und „politischen“ Flüchtlingen für die deutsche Politik ein elegantes Instrument zur effektiven Abschottung und ermöglicht es, dem Großteil der Flüchtigen jeden Schutz zu verwehren.

Freiburg rühmt sich bekanntermaßen gerne als „offene Stadt“. Für Flüchtlinge gilt dies nicht: Mehrere hundert Menschen, meist Roma, leben in heruntergekommenen Wohnheimen fernab der Öffentlichkeit, die lieber notdürftig renoviert werden, anstatt die ausgrenzende Lagerunterbringung endlich zu beenden. Die Freiburger Ausländerbehörde will die „unerwünschten Wirtschaftsflüchtlinge“ offenbar elegant loswerden, indem sie auchseit Jahren hier lebende Menschen in aussichtslose Asylverfahren drängt. Nach einem abgelehnten Asylantrag kann dann mit zusätzlicher Legitimierung umso schneller abgeschoben werden. Außerdem müsste ein Asylantrag in Karlsruhe gestellt werden und ist häufig mit einer neuen Zuteilung in die jeweiligen Kommunen verbunden: Somit entledigt sich die Freiburger Lokalpolitik vermeintlich des Problems, während den Betroffenen das Recht auf ein selbstbestimmtes Lebensumfeld erneut verwehrt wird.

Es hat sich erwiesen, dass der direkte Kontakt zwischen Flüchtlingen und Menschen mit deutscher Staatsangehörigkeit bzw. festem Aufenthaltsstatus ein konkreter Ansatzpunkt ist, an dem Solidarität entstehen kann. In Freiburg gibt es zahlreiche Initiativen und Menschen, die Kontakt zu den Betroffenen haben. Doch es braucht noch viel mehr Solidarität, um etwas zu bewegen!

Lasst uns gemeinsam auf die Straße gehen. Bringen wir unsere Solidarität zum Ausdruck. Zeigen wir, dass wir die Vertreibungen und Abschiebungen aus Freiburg nicht wollen und auch nicht akzeptieren.

Für eine „Offene Stadt Freiburg ohne Abschiebungen“!
Solidarität mit den Betroffenen!

Quelle: Aktion Bleiberecht
Stand: 16.04.2013

The Slovak media are reporting that allegedly as many as 20 skinhead attackers brutally beat up a Romani man from the Czech Republic at a party in the Central Slovakian town of Banská Štiavnica. The man lost consciousness as a result of the brawl. Two Georgians and the man’s girlfriend, who is a local resident, were also targeted for attack. It is not yet clear whether the conflict was racially motivated.

The incident occurred on the evening of Saturday 6 April at a local discotheque. There was some discord between two girls and shortly thereafter the brawl was unleashed. The Georgians and the Romani man were working in the town, the Georgians as part of an EU-sponsored volunteer program. The assailants beat Romani victim Pavel H. to such a degree that he lost consciousness twice. They also broke his girlfriend’s nose. The injured girl is filing criminal charges and the Georgians are considering informing their embassy of the incident. Witnesses claim the attackers pushed their victims to the ground and kicked them wildly. None of the discotheque’s other customers or its staff came to the aid of the victims. Discotheque owner Zuzana Kaníková insists her security personnel did what they could, but believes they had no “powers” to intervene against the attackers out on the street.

The Georgian volunteers are not able to say with 100 % certainty whether the assault was racially motivated, but they do have the feeling that the brutality of the attack was caused by the fact that they are foreigners. Both of the Georgians are dark-skinned and spoke English at the start of the incident. „My friend from Georgia got punched inside and his colleague came to his defense. Then everything went down very fast. The conflict moved into the vestibule, then the bouncers sent us outside and the assailants went out after us. I was struck from behind and that’s the last thing I remember. Maybe the fact that I was unconscious is what spared me,” Pavel H. told news server Sme.sk. “The most I can tell you is that we really are not able to confirm that this was racially motivated. However, the fact that it was 30 against three is completely unacceptable,” victim Pavel H. told Czech Radio. Pavel H. had previously worked in Banská Štiavnica as a volunteer before being hired there as an auto mechanic. “I have never had this big of a problem anywhere before. I am planning to keep on living here and I’m a bit afraid for my safety now,” he admitted.

Source: Romea.cz
Date: 11.04.2013

Anti-foreign nurse swoop on Peloponnese hospital explodes in violence as Roma patient’s friends confront Nazis

Members of Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party have clashed with a group of Roma in a raid on Kalamata Hospital in the southern Peloponnese. The extremists, led by MP Dimitris Koukoutsis, swooped on the hospital hunting for foreign nurses. Earlier this year, four women from Bulgaria were forced to leave the Panarkadiko hospital in Tripoli, Peloponnese, after dozens of Golden Dawn members evicted them.

This time, however, they were confronted by Roma who had taken to the hospital a 22-year-old victim of a racially motivated attack. Violence broke out between the two groups but was broken up by police.
Koukoutsis accused the Roma of „involvement in delinquency“ and said Golden Dawn would not regard them as equal citizens until they gave up crime. He said delinquency was „in their DNA“, according to ENET website. Hospital director Yirgos Bezos said that Golden Dawn’s raid on the hospital was „unacceptable.

The row came days after a leading member of a Roma settlement in Komotini, northern Greece, threatened Golden Dawn with a provocative video on YouTube. In the footage, two Roma men wield guns, axes and chainsaws and dare the neo-Nazi party to launch a raid on their camp. „You will have to send a lot of guys to my camp,“ says one man. Addressing Nikos Michaloliakos, chairman of Golden Dawn, the unnamed Roma leader brags about having many „crazy guys“ watching his back. „Michaloliakos, round up your mongrels,“ says the man.

Source + Video: International Business Time
Date: 10.04.2013

Throughout history, sometimes events seem perfectly aligned to spark racial violence. On March 10 of last year, the residents of the small village of Krásnohorské Podhradie, in the mountains of eastern Slovakia, looked up to the hilltop at the center of town to see their beloved 14th-century Krásna Hôrka Castle being engulfed in flames. By the time firefighters made it up the hill, the roof was gone and three bells had melted down into the tower.

The next day, a police spokesman announced that the fire had been caused by two Roma boys, aged 11 and 12, who lived in a ghetto on the edge of the village. They had allegedly been trying to light a cigarette at the bottom of the hill when an unusually strong gust of wind carried a piece of smoldering ash up the mountain, where it ignited wood strewn on the castle grounds. Whether or not they were responsible, the accused and their families were terrified – perhaps because, in the last two years, according to data from the European Roma Rights Center, there have been dozens of violent attacks on Roma in Slovakia – the ethnic group better known as Gypsies. Fearing reprisal, the boys were quickly spirited out of town to stay with relatives, while Roma men prepared throughout the night to defend their community. Ultimately, the boys weren’t charged with any crime because they’re minors, but the damage was done: the image of Gypsy kids setting fire to a hallmark of Slovak national heritage seemed to only reinforce the prejudices many white ethnic Slovaks have toward their country’s poorest citizens. With the burning of Krásna Hôrka Castle, the far right in Slovakia had their equivalent of 1933’s Reichstag fire – the symbolic event needed to justify a crackdown.

In mid-March, I flew to Slovakia and drove out to Krásnohorské Podhradie for a rally to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the burning of Krásna Hôrka. Marian Kotleba, a former teacher and leader of the far right People’s Party-Our Slovakia – named in honour of the clerical-fascist regime that ruled the Czechoslovak Republic between World War I and II – had pegged his dim electoral prospects on Krásna Hôrka and his stand against “Gypsy criminality.”

On arrival, I entered a lot beside the municipal offices. A crowd of about 150 people – skinheads, tough-looking townspeople and about 12 of Marian’s green-clad officer corps – stood around listening to Marian’s speech. My translator suggested parking away from the crowd so that there would be less of a chance of anyone noticing the Hungarian plates on our rental car. “If there’s one thing the neo-Nazis like less than Roma, it’s Hungarians,” he said, only half joking, referring to Slovak resentment of their former imperial neighbour.

A short, mustached man in black fatigues, Marian Kotleba stood in front of his blue zebra-striped Hummer flanked by two skinheads waving the party’s massive green flags. “We don’t like the way this government deprives polite people in order to improve the position of parasites,” he said in a stern, steady voice. An enormous yellow crane loomed above the castle on the hilltop, making repairs on the castle’s roof. “This burned castle is a symbol of the way it will go if the government doesn’t do anything with this growing and increasing menace,” Marian continued. “If we don’t do anything about it, the situation will continue getting worse… If the state wasn’t creating surprisingly good conditions for these Gypsy extremists, what do you think would happen? They would all go to England. They can go anywhere; they have freedom to move. If they suffer so much in Slovakia, no one is keeping them here. No one will miss them. I don’t have to tell you that I wouldn’t miss them at all.”

Enthusiastic applause rose up from the crowd. For another 20 minutes, Marian railed against the European Union and advocated for the rights of “polite people” – a code term for white ethnic Slovaks. The rally ended with Marian urging the townspeople to “open their eyes and do something.”

After the speech, I spoke with some of the skinheads. One, named Marek, suggested that Roma be put on reservations, “like the ones you all have for Native Americans.” A teenager in gray camo with a patch that read all cops are bastards snarled, “All the Gypsies should be gassed,” before being pulled away by elder neo-Nazis.

Later that evening, in what would be the climax of the day’s events, Marian drove his Hummer into the poor Roma settlement at the edge of the village and threatened the residents. Using a plot of land he had been given by a local sympathiser as leverage, he attempted to evict the Roma and demolish their homes. The residents responded by throwing stones and attacking his Hummer with hammers. In a statement released in the wake of the incident, Marian wrote, “We had only two options. Deal with the situation radically in the style of Milan Juhász [an off-duty police officer in western Slovakia who killed and wounded five Roma men last summer, claiming that he had to “restore order”]. We had four short ball guns and about 250 rounds of ammunition; however, we decided to give one last chance to the police.”

As the Eurozone crisis worsens and Slovakia considers austerity, moderates, left-wing politicians and average Slovaks all seem to be colluding, if accidentally, to scapegoat the country’s most precarious minority. According to recent estimates, there are around 440,000 Roma in Slovakia, representing about 8 percent of the population – one of the highest concentrations in Europe. According to monitoring and reports provided by the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC), racist violence, evictions, threats and more subtle forms of discrimination and prejudice have reached a crescendo over the past two years in Slovakia. The ERRC considers the situation in Slovakia to be one of the worst in Europe. In the past two years, 11 Slovak municipalities have erected walls to separate the residents of Roma ghettos from their white neighbours. On New Year’s Eve 2012, the mayor of the small village Zlaté Moravce (who, reportedly, was drunk) gave a speech in the town square to over 1,000 residents where he called on members of the “white race” to fight “unemployed parasites”, which prompted packs of skinheads to chase Roma teenagers out of bars throughout the town.

The issue is not only neo-Nazis but also the deep-seated prejudices of white Slovaks. In December, the decapitated body of a Roma man – beheaded by the town butcher – was found in a sewer in a nearby village. Last April, in the eastern Slovak village of Chotěbuz, a Czech man used a crossbow to shoot and kill a Roma man who was looking for scrap metal. The shooter allegedly shouted, “You black whores! I’ll kill you!” And over the past year, the Slovak Spectator has reported at least four cases of racially motivated violence against black and brown foreigners by neo-Nazis in Slovakia, including an American basketball player signed by a Slovak team.

The Roma are a heterogeneous ethnic group historians believe migrated from India around the 9th century into what is now Iraq, ending up in the Balkans and Eastern Europe by the 14th century. They have always been persecuted. According to Isabel Fonseca’s book Bury Me Standing, laws passed in 15th-century Europe permitted the execution of Roma without any evidence of a crime. In medieval Wallachia and Moldavia, Roma were traded as slaves. One Roma slave could be traded for a pig. Up until the 17th and 18th centuries, aristocrats held “heathen hunts” and set forests on fire to drive Roma out of hiding and kill them. Today, there are approximately 13 million Roma in the world, the vast majority of them in Europe.

After the collapse of Communism and its separation from the Czech Republic in 1993, democratic Slovakia gave minority rights to Roma citizens, which in practice has resulted in their widespread marginalisation by the white Slovak and Hungarian majority. In a speech made this February, the prime minister of Slovakia, Robert Fico, accused the Roma of trying to blackmail the Slovak state on the issue. “We did not establish our independent state for minorities, although we respect them, but mainly for the Slovak state-forming nation,” he said, going on to complain about the “strange tendency to put forward the position of minorities.” The topsy-turvy political constellation of the former Eastern bloc is such that Prime Minister Fico, a pragmatic, social-democratic politician, is also known for mocking human rights observers and indulging in nationalist rhetoric.

In 2005, an initiative co-sponsored by the EU, the European Commission and the World Bank, among other organisations, was undertaken with the intention of making this the Decade of Roma Inclusion for Slovakia and 11 other countries. The European Social Fund committed a billion euros to helping Roma in Slovakia meet predetermined benchmarks in employment, education and social inclusion. Today there is little to show for those funds spent in Slovakia. A recent UN Development Program report painted a grim picture: of the 43 percent of contracts and funds designated to be relevant to marginalised Roma by Slovakian municipalities, only 18 percent have actually reached marginalised Roma communities. In my interviews with Roma, there was a widespread perception that white municipalities were funding self-serving development projects with funds that had been earmarked for Roma communities.

On the other side, there is a persistent theory among white Slovaks that the EU architects are funneling money into Slovakia to turn it into a giant ghetto, thus preventing Roma from migrating to countries like Great Britain and France.

Both of these perceptions may not be entirely implausible. A source who was party to high-level European Commission and World Bank meetings (and who did not wished to be named) told me that she got the sense that the underlying reason for pushing social programs was to curtail Roma immigration from Eastern to Western Europe. There are also reports that the European Commission has threatened to nullify the Balkans visa-liberalisation program – which allows Balkan residents to move fluidly between their borders and those of the EU – if they don’t do something to stabilise their Roma population. Western Europe doesn’t want the Roma, and Slovakia doesn’t want them either.

A few days before the neo-Nazi rally, I visited a Roma ghetto. I drove past skeletal trees, black muddy fields, World War II monuments, and gothic, bleeding crucifixes on middle-of-nowhere country roads to Košice, a grim industrial city in eastern Slovakia that seemed little changed since the collapse of Communism. Earlier this year Košice was given the EU’s “2013 European Capital of Culture” award, alongside Marseille, France. It seemed like a strange choice. The cobblestone streets of the historic Old Town emptied out completely around ten at night, giving the place a vaguely Stasi feel. The selection seemed conveniently timed to stoke enthusiasm for the EU in a country facing austerity and a 33 percent youth unemployment rate.

There are at least 14 informal Roma settlements scattered around Košice, in addition to massive social-housing projects like Luník IX, a cellblock for thousands of Roma that has become a kind of Epcot exhibition of devastating poverty. In late February, several hundred white Slovak activists – unaffiliated with the neo-Nazis – marched through the streets of Košice. The organisers told the media, “Gypsy criminality has destroyed many lives.”

On the outskirts of Košice, under a dystopian Eastern bloc skyline of steel factories, pods and towers spewing smoke, we came to the exurban village of Vel’ká Ida. In August, Vel’ká Ida’s moderate-right mayor erected a six-foot concrete wall in front of the Roma settlement (ostensibly to keep Roma children from being struck by passing cars). Around the same time, the mayor cut access to the water supply for the community of 800 people to two hours a day, citing overuse.

At Vel’ká Ida, I met Carlo, the unofficial leader of the Roma settlement. Behind the wall that separates the community from the road, houses collapsed in on themselves, dogs perched on the edges of massive trash containers and smoke wafted in from the industrial skyline. Carlo’s wife, a hardscrabble woman in her 50s, led us through the crowd and into their shack.

Carlo, a short and tough middle-aged man, held court from his bed, which was situated in the kitchen. Out of the 800 Roma living in the settlement, he was one of the few who had been able to secure employment and proudly displayed his ID from US Steel, where he did manual labour for 350 euros a month. “Slovakia is the worst nation for Roma. The government is a bunch of racists,” he said. When I asked about the new wall he shrugged. “I know it’s racism, I know it’s segregation. But we’ve got bigger problems we’re dealing with at the moment, like the water; and the unemployment.”

A Roma guy in his 20s sitting silently in the kitchen suddenly spoke up and disagreed with Carlo. “If the mayor was right about the wall being built to protect children, why did he build it up so high?” he asked. “It’s to make us invisible.” Carlo shook his head and said that drunk, local whites routinely drove into the settlement at night to harass them and shoot off guns. “Look, you can see poverty on us,” Carlo said. “Now with the far right people with their rhetoric against the Roma, what do they want from us? What do they want to take from us? We have nothing.”

Under Communism, the Roma had no official minority rights (the concept of minority rights ran counter to the uncompromising unity required to maintain the vast Soviet system). There was, however, guaranteed housing in the city centers and plenty of industrial jobs; integration was enforced and discrimination could be punished. The authorities relocated Roma around Czechoslovakia as needed, attempting to mold the ethnic group into a kind of malleable industrial workforce.

Over the past 20 years, through a process that could be viewed as coordinated gentrification, the Roma were pushed out of Slovakia’s city centers and into segregated settlements at the fringes of cities and villages. The number of informal Roma settlements and ghettos in Slovakia grew from 278 in 1988 to 620 in 2000. According to recent UN Development Program reports, Roma unemployment currently hovers around 70 percent – compared to 33 percent for non-Roma. Nearly all the Roma I interviewed were unemployed. Many white Slovaks I spoke with tended to attribute the Roma’s “work-shy” disposition, while human rights groups blame it on widespread discrimination and prejudice.

Two days after my time with Carlo, I sat in a municipal office in a 17th-century castle across the street from the Roma settlement, speaking with Vel’ká Ida’s mayor, Július Beluscsák. He struck me as a vain and priggish man, from his limp handshake to his pointy, zip-up snakeskin boots. I felt embarrassed that I had walked into his spotlessly clean office with dirty shoes, caked in the mud of the settlement. The mayor, a former physician and a coalition candidate from Slovakia’s center-right and center-left parties, rattled off the relevant statistics: there were 1,300 Roma in his town, 75 of whom were employed, “and somewhere around 200 stray dogs”. Ninety percent of the Roma, he claimed, didn’t understand basic hygiene. When asked about administering a district with these kinds of social problems, he sighed and said, “I’m envious of those mayors who have no Roma in their municipalities. The Roma settlement out here in Vel’ká Ida is probably one of the worst in all of Slovakia. The women are having children starting from age 13 to 33. We have a case of a 33-year-old woman who has 11 kids. They’re having children to get social benefits. They have no obligations or duties. The children don’t get vaccinated.”

One aspect of the prejudice toward Roma centers on notions of hygiene. While in the United States, the word Gypsy arguably doesn’t carry an explicitly negative connotation, the Slovak word Cigáni does – it roughly translates to “filthy Gypsy”. In 2011, ethnic Slovaks started a movement called Zobudme sa (“Let’s Wake Up”), collecting the signatures of the mayors of around 400 cities and towns in an attempt to coordinate demolitions of Roma shanty settlements. The signatories are attempting to use environmental law to reclassify informal settlements as dumping grounds, and evict their residents on the grounds of trash being strewn about and other unhygienic conditions. But the mayors behind the Let’s Wake Up movement aren’t proposing Roma integration into white communities or improved social housing. They just want them out of sight and out of mind. In October, the mayor of Košice evicted 156 people from a settlement and bought them one-way bus tickets out of town. The mayor of the village they were sent to – also a signatory of Let’s Wake Up – then bought them one-way bus tickets back to Košice. According to a recent ERRC monitor report, those who were evicted were squatting in the forest.

By exacerbating the conditions that made it difficult for the Roma to get work, vaccinations and decent housing – by treating them as undesirables – weren’t the municipalities contributing to the conditions the Roma were being blamed for creating? The mayor’s explanations, like the ideology of Let’s Wake Up, seemed like a catch-22: according to him, the Roma are unhygienic because they are poor; but the Roma are poor because they’re unhygienic. Let’s just do away with them all, the logic seemed to be, and history has shown us where this thinking ultimately leads.

When I asked the mayor how the situation of the town’s Roma could be improved, he said, “They need to be dealt with in a dictatorial fashion.” I pressed him on what exactly that meant, and he explained, “No, no. Dictatorial like under Communism. Back then, having a job was compulsory. If the children didn’t go to school, the police would come and beat the parents up.”

The mayor then abruptly walked over to his cabinet and pulled out some village gift bags and a soccer pennant. The bags contained a towel and a badge, each adorned with Vel’ká Ida’s village crest – a castle turret guarded by two lancers. “Vel’ká Ida is very famous,” he gloated. “There actually used to be a Gypsy castle here in the 15th century. When the Czechs attacked, these Gypsy lancers helped to defend us.”

“This was a real castle? The Roma helped defend it?” I said, completely confused.

“No,” the mayor replied, rubbing his chin. “It was only a myth.”

In recent Slovakian laws and the comments of elected officials, a word that is cropping up with disturbing frequency is inadaptable. The perception is that there are two types of Roma: those who can integrate into white society and those who choose to live in filthy, segregated settlements.

In 2001, Prime Minister Fico said, “The great mass of Roma want to just lie in bed on social support and family benefit. These people have discovered that, because of family benefit, it is advantageous to have children.” Shockingly, forced and coerced sterilisation of Roma women occurred in Slovakian hospitals as recently as 2004, when strategic litigation resulted in an informed consent requirement being written into the country’s health-care laws. Testimonies compiled by the Center for Civil and Human Rights in 2003 showed an egregious pattern of abuse perpetrated by white Slovak doctors in hospitals. They were reportedly telling Roma women that they were having too many children – and sometimes mentally disabled children – in order to receive increased child-support benefits. The testimonies are a collection of horrors: the attempted rape of a Roma woman by an ambulance driver as she was going into labour, women raped by their gynecologists, women saying they were not given painkillers during birth, and, in one particularly horrifying instance, a woman being forced to give birth on the hospital floor with a doctor screaming, “You are a pig, so you should give birth like a pig!”

In my interviews and interactions with white Slovaks, many seemed to regard Roma as welfare queens bent on abusing government programs. Last April, Peter Pollak became the first Roma elected to Slovakia’s parliament. As Plenipotentiary for Roma Communities, he is also in charge of advising the government on Roma issues. While there are a few glimmers of hope, such as an amended antidiscrimination law that will take effect in April, enthusiasm for Pollak has somewhat dimmed with the perception that he is being used by the prime minister and ministry of interior to push a paternalistic set of reforms called the “Right Way”, written to address the children of “socially inadaptable citizens”. The laws, many of which have yet to be implemented, make it so that criminal records and children’s school attendance affect the social benefits Roma families can collect. For his part, Prime Minister Fico stated earlier this year that the best hope for Roma was to separate the children from their families and place them in boarding schools. “Someone should show these children they can live in a different way,” he said.

An hour north of Košice, at the edge of the city of Prešov, we visited another Roma ghetto – the Old Brick-Kiln, an enormous social-housing complex wedged beside the highway. Constructed 13 years ago with EU funds, this crumbling structure provides housing for 2,000 Roma and looks like something out of Robert Moses’s wet dreams. In 2010, the city built a wall and an iron gate on the hill behind the complex, closing off the easiest and safest access to the town. Keys were doled out to the non-Roma neighbours so that they could access their garden plots, but not the Roma residents. The 15-minute walk to school for Roma children became a 45-minute walk along a highway. And, of course, the municipality does not provide school buses.

Slovakian schools still have segregated classrooms for Roma and whites. Many Roma children are diagnosed with disabilities and, according to ERRC reports, make up 60 percent of special-education schools. Although a historic 2012 verdict by a Slovak court ended overt segregation and was praised by human rights watchdogs, a de facto segregation persists much as after Brown v. Board of Education. Some Roma parents told me the only change is that Roma and white students now eat lunch together. Roma NGOs and media organisations report that white Slovaks are moving from villages into the cities to avoid having their children share classrooms with Roma children, in what constitutes a sort of reverse “white flight”.

In the Old Brick-Kiln, we were guided to the apartment of the unofficial leader of the complex, Milan Daňo. Milan, a stocky 50-year-old Roma man covered in tattoos from neck to knuckles, worked as a community coordinator for a Roma nonprofit until he was dismissed in November. Of the 2,000 residents who live in the Old Brick-Kiln, he was one of the few who had been able to secure employment. Milan said his dismissal was related to a statement he made to a journalist over the summer: “First they tore down the Berlin Wall, then they built up the Roma wall!” He had also signed a petition against the barrier. “I hear that the mayor says he doesn’t want to see me anymore,” he said, looking downcast.

In the 90s, the majority of Prešov’s Roma still lived on two streets in the city center. Their apartments were declared uninhabitable, they were evicted and the Old Brick-Kiln was offered up as an alternative. “While they were building this place, they told us that it would be a military barracks, so we wouldn’t get frightened that they were going to relocate us.”

Milan and all the Old Brick-Kiln’s other residents pay rent and have leases at the complex. But, I wondered, why couldn’t people find other accommodations after they were evicted from the city center? Both the translator and Milan shook their heads balefully, indicating that I just didn’t understand. “It’s not possible – the non-Roma in the city would never rent to us.”

The ledger book still didn’t seem to add up. How did 2,000 unemployed Roma afford to pay 300 euros each, per month, for their apartments? “Some people use their child support to pay rent, others use social benefit or have informal jobs. We’re taking out loans,” Milan said. He explained that there had been a few “activation schemes” – work-stimulus programs financed by the EU and Slovakian municipalities – but that these temp gigs sweeping streets, cleaning gutters and shoveling snow were only assigned to 15 or 20 people and sometimes didn’t even pay.

Milan’s wife Zlata, a non-Roma but also unemployed, said, “The whole non-Roma public is criticising us for being ‘work-shy’. The thing is, being Roma keeps you from getting a job. If I can’t get a job, how can I expect him to with all this discrimination?”

Milan and Zlata perceived these activation schemes to be less about providing sustainable employment than providing a modicum of busywork for habitually “work-shy” Roma communities.

The Czechoslovak Republic was the first country in 20th-century Europe to initiate a “solution” for the Roma. The 1927 Law of Migrating Gypsies required all gypsies to be filed, registered and classified with the authorities. Austria and Weimar, Germany, followed suit with their Central Office for the Fight Against the Gypsies. They were banned from public baths, forced to carry ID cards, and their civil rights were impeded. The legislation intensified with Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws, the Reich Citizenship Law and a Gypsy version of Kristallnacht, called Gypsy Clean-Up Week. The “final solution to the Gypsy question” was first mentioned by Himmler in 1938.

Most historians estimate that between 500,000 and 1.5 million Roma perished during the Nazi era. In the postwar reckoning and memorialisation, the Roma were largely excluded and forgotten. They were not present during the score-settling Nuremberg trials and received no reparations. The view was that Roma were murdered by the Nazis and the Axis countries not for racial reasons, but for their persistently asocial and criminal behaviour – the same reasons given for their persecution today. The Roma holocaust didn’t even receive a proper name until the 1990s, when it was dubbed Porajmos – the “Devouring”.

As early as 1939, adult male Gypsies could be sent to disciplinary labour camps in the Czech Protectorate. In 1942, SS commander Horst Böhme in Prague issued an order to “fight against the Gypsy plague”. At least 1,039 Roma had their property confiscated and were deported to Lety, a former disciplinary camp an hour from Prague, which was operated not by the SS, but by Czechs. Today, a functioning, industrial pig farm sits on the site of the former camp.

On a cold night at a pub near the center of Prague, I met Markus Pape, an investigative journalist who authored the 1997 book Nobody Will Believe You: A Document of the Lety Concentration Camp. “The title,” he told me, “came from what the Roma survivors were told when they came out of Lety and tried to tell their story. People said, ‘No one will ever believe you.’” A chain-smoking German émigré to the Czech Republic, Markus has a haunted and disheveled demeanor that middle-aged investigative journalists so often seem to possess.

Markus’s book drew on archives and first-person testimonies of Roma survivors. It’s unfortunate that when we talk about the Nazi era, we deal with people as statistics – much in the same way the Nazis reduced humans to numbers. In the Europe-wide schema of extermination, the Lety camp was comparatively small. Three hundred and twenty-six people died in Lety, 241 of them children. The Czech historians who knew of Lety wrote it off as relatively benign, similar to the Japanese interment camps in the US during World War II. It was their view that the children who perished there had suffered from an unfortunate typhus outbreak in the Stalingrad winter of 1943.

Markus’s book was the first to suggest that a grievous crime had been committed. In his research, he found that deaths occurred before the typhus outbreak of 1943. He argued that Lety should be reclassified as a concentration camp. This caused an uproar among Czech historians and the Czech government, and it didn’t help that Markus was German. “The view from the Czechs was, ‘This is not nice,’” he sighed. “It didn’t fit into this Czech self-perception as victims of World War II. Their view of themselves is, ‘Occasionally we broke the rules, but we were not like Germany or any imperial nation.’” Even if Lety was just used as an internment camp, more than 500 Roma were transported from there to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

The camp at Lety was demolished after the typhus outbreak, and none of the Czechs responsible were ever convicted of any crime. The camp remained forgotten until the early 90s when an American businessman and amateur genealogist named Paul Polansky rediscovered it in the Czech archives and informed the US Congress. In response, Václav Havel, the first president of the democratic Czech Republic, commissioned a small memorial to be erected near the pig farm in 1995 but didn’t solicit any Roma input during the design phase. “Can you imagine building a Holocaust memorial without consulting any Jewish people?” Markus asked rhetorically. The current Czech prime minister visited the memorial last summer but insisted there was no way to evict the owners of the pig farm.

Markus, who now works part-time as a human rights monitor, mentioned that he watched the American film Mississippi Burning the night before. “I was shocked by how many things in the movie were the same kind of things that happen here with Roma,” he said, describing how in 2009, he had investigated an attack on a Roma apartment building by neo-Nazis that left a young girl permanently burned. “When I talk to my Czech friends about the Roma, they think it is a problem that will never be solved. Maybe it’s something like the Israel and Palestine issue. For Israel, there is no solution.”

The next morning, Markus and I drove out to the funereal, empty Czech village of Lety and up over a hill to the site of the former camp. “The camp was built on the other side of a hill so no one could see what was going on,” he explained. We turned down a two-lane rural road that soon turned from pavement to dirt. In the gray afternoon, the pig farm, with its rusted barbed-wire fence and lines of gray barracks with foul-smelling smoke rising from the chimneys, looked like a textbook photograph of a concentration camp. We stood atop the cold hill, examining a historical placard that showed the location of the former site. “Survivors said they were tortured here,” Markus said. “One survivor who had been in both Auschwitz and Lety said that Lety was worse because it was the Czechs, their own people doing it. Auschwitz was very bad, but you could see the gas chambers coming. In Lety you never knew what would happen from day to day.”

Havel’s memorial, situated in a copse of snow-dusted trees, looked like the kind of outdoor Baptist amphitheater you might find in suburban Houston. “The problem is that visitors come here and they see the pig farm from the road, and they say, ‘Is that the memorial? It looks like a concentration camp,’” Markus said. Across a small pond, the pig farm continued to belch gray smoke. Markus pointed at the pond and said, “Survivors said that children were drowned in there.”

Back in the village, we visited an information center about the Lety camp. The small, unheated room smelled like wet cigarette butts, and strange funhouse mirrors hung on the walls. On the way out, after looking over the historical placards, we checked the guestbook. Someone had scrawled “Gypsies to the gas!” across a full page.

On the drive back to Prague, Markus and I discussed the future. “Today, any government that supports Roma will lose the next election,” he said. “Democracy is supposed to be the protection of minorities. Without that protection, the minorities will be suppressed by what the majority decides. I think people in post-Communist countries are having difficulty adjusting to this. After ’89, we lost a major part of our identity, being part of this international Communist bloc. And where are we now? What do we have to be proud of? We needed to revive our nationalistic approach to fill the void. And the Roma don’t fit into this approach.”

This artilce was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.

Source: Vice
Date: 12.04.2013