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http://www.thestar.com/article/694756
No hope for Roma in Czech ghettos
ROSIE DIMANNO
/TORONTO STAR
Rampant discrimination explains why 'gypsies' in former Eastern Bloc seek Canadian asylum
Sep 12, 2009 04:30 AM
KLADNO [Czech Republic]—It is the first day of school. The children are well-scrubbed and neatly dressed. Some, the littlest and most excited, have their mothers in tow as they wait at the bus stop.
The bus pulls in. The doors fold open. The driver glares.
And forbids them from boarding.
"I don't take gypsies."
Moms, incensed, start to yell. Kids, confused and frightened, begin to cry. The driver, unmoved, slams shut the door and the bus rumbles off, leaving youngsters stricken and adults seared with shame.
Many of these children have just had their introductory lesson in what it means to be Roma – reviled and excluded – in this so-civilized country.
Ask the question: Why did 2,869 Czech Roma wash up at Toronto's Pearson airport between Oct. 2007 and June 2009, seeking asylum as alleged political refugees?
Here is an answer: Rust-belt Kladno – birthplace of NHL star Jaromir Jagr – a mining eyesore 25 kilometres northwest of cosmopolitan Prague, where gypsy children are unwelcome in public schools and on buses, where families live upwards of 10 to a single room in a dilapidated tenement building on the hardscrabble edge of town.
A single water meter serves nearly 700 residents. Toxic asbestos insulation oozes from the walls.
It was this address – a one-time meat-packaging plant known as Masokombinat – that was fire-bombed by skinheads last year, though fortunately the projectiles landed in a clump of bushes out front. Unlike, say, the Molotov cocktail assault in April on a Roma home in the town of Vitkov that left a 22-month-old girl with burns to 80 per cent of her body.
These are not isolated incidents. In Czech towns with a heavy Roma population, in the gypsy ghettos of Prague, violent attacks against the ethnic minority have escalated alarmingly in recent years. Right wing groups and the anti-immigrant political parties that feed on Roma resentment are on the march across all of Europe, most especially in former Iron Curtain countries.
The Czech Republic is not even the worst offender in making pariahs of Roma. Unlike neighbouring Slovakia, there are no gypsy villages or squatter camps. But it is the Czech Roma who brought the issue of a people's crippling discrimination to political prominence in Canada, with Ottawa this summer making the controversial decision to reimpose visa requirements in order to staunch the flow of asylum seekers. Some 3,000 Roma have settled in Hamilton, overwhelming social services.
In Kladno, Canada might as well be Oz.
That is an underlying complication in the exodus to Canada – those who can afford to leave are most often the Roma suffering least from privation and racism. Many, it is believed, paid "mediators" – both here and there – who helped facilitate asylum applications, which included advice on how to exaggerate their experience of racial discrimination.
Isabella Tokarova would not need to exaggerate.
The 38-year-old lives at Masokombinat with her husband and three children, the oldest son already emigrated to England.
She is still fuming that her 5-year-old boy, David, was not permitted on the school bus, heatedly stating her case to a female police officer.
"They let all the white people come on board but not the gypsies. I told the driver: `You are a racist!' He just sat there and continued to insult me, said we didn't have the right to ride on the bus or attend white schools.
"I swear, if I had the possibility of leaving this country, I would pay everything I have to get out. But we are stuck here, where we don't want to be and where they don't want us to be."
Tokarova pinches her dusky flesh. "This is who I am. This is why nobody will give us a chance to prove that we are decent people, too."
Vera Benakova, 47, recalls when her daughter started at the local school and was assigned to share a desk with a white girl. "Her mother came to the school and slapped the teacher across the face."
Prague was severely censured by the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled the Czech Republic was discriminating against Roma children by putting them in special schools – for "backward" kids – as a matter of public policy, a systematic streaming that precluded them from advancing academically and led to early drop-out, usually after Grade 8, which is required to obtain a driver's license.
The government has, formally, phased out that program but many gypsy students are still segregated in Roma-only classes within mainstream schools, where they follow a different curriculum and are stigmatized from the get-go.
The Czech Republic is the only EU country that has no anti-discrimination laws that could prevent such things.
The collapse of communism in the Czech Republic, while sparking a vigorous free market economy for most citizens to enjoy – this is a wealthy nation – had only lousy consequences for Roma. Under the Communist regime employment was mandatory, meaning at least menial jobs for gypsies, and guaranteed housing.
State socialism did provide a tattered security blanket and, arguably, restrained the worst of racial prejudices. That buffer has disappeared. Local authorities sold municipal and social housing to private owners in the red-hot real estate market that ensued. In many towns, Romas were relocated to designated areas and housing estates that developed into ghettos.
Non-Roma already living in those areas who couldn't afford to buy up – their own house values plummeting when Roma moved into their midst – are seething side-by-side with the newcomers, ripe for overtures by fascists, neo-Nazis and fringe xenophobic parties.
No less than Jiri Cunek, head of the Christian Democratic Party and former deputy prime minister, made retrograde racism acceptable when, as mayor of Vsetin, he ordered dozens of Roma families removed from a rundown building in the centre of town to a decrepit housing estate on its periphery.
These housing estates have become the scene of far-right marches and riots, extremists portraying themselves as defenders of the working class against gypsy criminals and welfare parasites; Roma leaders in turn have called for the formation of patrols to protect their homes. It's a perfect incubator for spiralling violence.
A government study in 2006 found that 80,000 Roma – out of a gypsy Czech population of about 300,000 – were living in some 300 ghetto-like communities, four-fifths of which had come into existence in just a decade. Predictably, as occurs everyplace where an underclass is bottled up and denied a lifeline, criminality jumped. Little wonder that, according to polls, nine out of 10 Czechs don't want Roma neighbours.
No hope for Roma in Czech ghettos
ROSIE DIMANNO
/TORONTO STAR
Rampant discrimination explains why 'gypsies' in former Eastern Bloc seek Canadian asylum
Sep 12, 2009 04:30 AM
KLADNO [Czech Republic]—It is the first day of school. The children are well-scrubbed and neatly dressed. Some, the littlest and most excited, have their mothers in tow as they wait at the bus stop.
The bus pulls in. The doors fold open. The driver glares.
And forbids them from boarding.
"I don't take gypsies."
Moms, incensed, start to yell. Kids, confused and frightened, begin to cry. The driver, unmoved, slams shut the door and the bus rumbles off, leaving youngsters stricken and adults seared with shame.
Many of these children have just had their introductory lesson in what it means to be Roma – reviled and excluded – in this so-civilized country.
Ask the question: Why did 2,869 Czech Roma wash up at Toronto's Pearson airport between Oct. 2007 and June 2009, seeking asylum as alleged political refugees?
Here is an answer: Rust-belt Kladno – birthplace of NHL star Jaromir Jagr – a mining eyesore 25 kilometres northwest of cosmopolitan Prague, where gypsy children are unwelcome in public schools and on buses, where families live upwards of 10 to a single room in a dilapidated tenement building on the hardscrabble edge of town.
A single water meter serves nearly 700 residents. Toxic asbestos insulation oozes from the walls.
It was this address – a one-time meat-packaging plant known as Masokombinat – that was fire-bombed by skinheads last year, though fortunately the projectiles landed in a clump of bushes out front. Unlike, say, the Molotov cocktail assault in April on a Roma home in the town of Vitkov that left a 22-month-old girl with burns to 80 per cent of her body.
These are not isolated incidents. In Czech towns with a heavy Roma population, in the gypsy ghettos of Prague, violent attacks against the ethnic minority have escalated alarmingly in recent years. Right wing groups and the anti-immigrant political parties that feed on Roma resentment are on the march across all of Europe, most especially in former Iron Curtain countries.
The Czech Republic is not even the worst offender in making pariahs of Roma. Unlike neighbouring Slovakia, there are no gypsy villages or squatter camps. But it is the Czech Roma who brought the issue of a people's crippling discrimination to political prominence in Canada, with Ottawa this summer making the controversial decision to reimpose visa requirements in order to staunch the flow of asylum seekers. Some 3,000 Roma have settled in Hamilton, overwhelming social services.
In Kladno, Canada might as well be Oz.
That is an underlying complication in the exodus to Canada – those who can afford to leave are most often the Roma suffering least from privation and racism. Many, it is believed, paid "mediators" – both here and there – who helped facilitate asylum applications, which included advice on how to exaggerate their experience of racial discrimination.
Isabella Tokarova would not need to exaggerate.
The 38-year-old lives at Masokombinat with her husband and three children, the oldest son already emigrated to England.
She is still fuming that her 5-year-old boy, David, was not permitted on the school bus, heatedly stating her case to a female police officer.
"They let all the white people come on board but not the gypsies. I told the driver: `You are a racist!' He just sat there and continued to insult me, said we didn't have the right to ride on the bus or attend white schools.
"I swear, if I had the possibility of leaving this country, I would pay everything I have to get out. But we are stuck here, where we don't want to be and where they don't want us to be."
Tokarova pinches her dusky flesh. "This is who I am. This is why nobody will give us a chance to prove that we are decent people, too."
Vera Benakova, 47, recalls when her daughter started at the local school and was assigned to share a desk with a white girl. "Her mother came to the school and slapped the teacher across the face."
Prague was severely censured by the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled the Czech Republic was discriminating against Roma children by putting them in special schools – for "backward" kids – as a matter of public policy, a systematic streaming that precluded them from advancing academically and led to early drop-out, usually after Grade 8, which is required to obtain a driver's license.
The government has, formally, phased out that program but many gypsy students are still segregated in Roma-only classes within mainstream schools, where they follow a different curriculum and are stigmatized from the get-go.
The Czech Republic is the only EU country that has no anti-discrimination laws that could prevent such things.
The collapse of communism in the Czech Republic, while sparking a vigorous free market economy for most citizens to enjoy – this is a wealthy nation – had only lousy consequences for Roma. Under the Communist regime employment was mandatory, meaning at least menial jobs for gypsies, and guaranteed housing.
State socialism did provide a tattered security blanket and, arguably, restrained the worst of racial prejudices. That buffer has disappeared. Local authorities sold municipal and social housing to private owners in the red-hot real estate market that ensued. In many towns, Romas were relocated to designated areas and housing estates that developed into ghettos.
Non-Roma already living in those areas who couldn't afford to buy up – their own house values plummeting when Roma moved into their midst – are seething side-by-side with the newcomers, ripe for overtures by fascists, neo-Nazis and fringe xenophobic parties.
No less than Jiri Cunek, head of the Christian Democratic Party and former deputy prime minister, made retrograde racism acceptable when, as mayor of Vsetin, he ordered dozens of Roma families removed from a rundown building in the centre of town to a decrepit housing estate on its periphery.
These housing estates have become the scene of far-right marches and riots, extremists portraying themselves as defenders of the working class against gypsy criminals and welfare parasites; Roma leaders in turn have called for the formation of patrols to protect their homes. It's a perfect incubator for spiralling violence.
A government study in 2006 found that 80,000 Roma – out of a gypsy Czech population of about 300,000 – were living in some 300 ghetto-like communities, four-fifths of which had come into existence in just a decade. Predictably, as occurs everyplace where an underclass is bottled up and denied a lifeline, criminality jumped. Little wonder that, according to polls, nine out of 10 Czechs don't want Roma neighbours.
I do. As a tourist, Gypsies sing music and dance along the rivers of Europe, making a great atmosphere. However, when you actually live in Europe, and experience gypsies pick pocketing you, pissing in the street and begging for money (nothing like you've seen in North America) it is not so romantic or pleasant. The whole of the Gypsy lifestyle is to wander, to live in temporary ghetto-like conditions - that IS GYPSY life style. 
