RIGHTS: Czech Govt Cracks Down on Racism

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Peter Shadbolt

PRAGUE, Feb 25 1999 (IPS) - A government drive to stamp out racism in the Czech Republic began this week with a police raid on a skinhead gathering in the western city of Plzen.

The crackdown – which led to three arrests under newly formulated race laws which carry a maximum 15-year sentence – netted the usual cache of neo-Nazi merchandise but, more importantly an address book of leading activists in the Czech Republic.

Police say this will aid them strike at the roots of racism in this country.

The new get tough policy comes after warnings from Brussels that Czech hopes of joining the European Union after the year 2000 could be jeopardised if race attacks were not curbed.

But human rights organisations expressed doubts that the arrest of a few skin heads would end institutionalised racism in the Czech Republic – mainly toward the country’s Roma inority.

The pointed to a debate over Maticni Street in the northern Czech town of Usti nad Labem which throws into sharp relief the complex problems of discrimination at a local level.

The street – situated on the rust-bucket outskirts of a declining post-Communist river port – has become the focus of racial tension because the local council wants to build a wall at one end of a council estate housing gypsies.

The plan effectively would segregate the 104 Roma who live in two run-down council blocks from the prim terrace houses standing opposite.

“Just look at it! We need a wall to stop the smell and the noise and okay, yes, the sight of it. And it’s got to be four metres high, not two metres,” said one Czech resident who lives opposite the estate.

As a measure of the racial tension, the Roma living in the so- called temporary accommodation of Maticni Street – sometimes whole families to one room – say they would welcome the wall.

“We’ve had camera crews here from all over the world and that’s bringing a lot of bad attention to this place,” said Tibor Bady, 49, the leader of the council estate’s recently formed “Rainbow” action group.

“There have been three skinhead attacks on us since summer. We want a wall to protect us…but not the four-metre one the council wants. It has to be two metres high with holes in it. This is not a ghetto,” he said.

The Roma claim the battle began with a protest over rubbish services with the local Czech residents throwing refuse out of their windows to protest the lack of communal bins. But the local white residents say the issue started when a gypsy was hit by a car on the busy main road.

They said a fight erupted between gypsies and the driver of the car which developed into a near-riot. Mayor Ladislav Hruska’s response was to back a proposal for the construction of a four- metre wall to contain the rubbish, the residents and the unsightly flats which are flanked by two derelict blocks.

Since then, Bady and his action group have been negotiating. A clean-up of the estate for a promise of no wall. A lower wall for a children’s playground and youth facilities.

The best they now concede is that there will be a two-metre wall with holes for access and nothing more.

The saga of Maticni Street is only the latest in a series of episodes in the Czech Republic’s uneasy relations with its 300,000- strong Roma population.

In 1997, a television documentary on how Czech gypsies had succeeded after emigrating to Canada and Britain led to a mass exodus. Scores were put on return flights from Canada, hundreds were held in temporary accommodation in Calais and Dover.

The immigration officials in New Zealand, meanwhile, have braced themselves for the next wave after some Roma families told the Czech media that they planned to take advantage of the relaxed visa requirements between the two countries to request asylum there.

While many detractors say unemployment and the lure of a better lifestyle is the motivation for most of the Gypsy emigres, the statistics on race attacks in the Czech Republics make grim reading.

Racially motivated attacks since 1989 have left 32 Czech gypsies dead, with the low-point reached last June when a 40-year-old father of five, Milan Lacko, was knocked unconscious by a gang of youths in the Moravian town of Orlova.

Lying unconscious on the road, he was killed when he was run over by a car and a truck, neither of which stopped.

To a country largely hardened to media coverage of racial attacks, the gratuitous attack and fatal series of events shocked many Czechs. A government commission on Roma affairs logged nearly almost 100 criminal assaults on gypsies in 1997 – a 50 percent increase on the previous year.

A recent visit by a British delegation headed by the Deputy Foreign Secretary Michael O’Brien, saw first hand the conditions of Roma living in the Moravian capital of Brno. Despite efforts by the vice chairman of the Czech Supreme Court, Pavel Kucera, to reassure the delegation the Czech Republic was doing everything in its power to ease racial problems, the British were shocked by what they saw.

“I was trying to persuade them that discrimination was not the cause of their poor social situation but after the delegation made a visit to a particular gypsy locality where they could see the conditions for themselves, it was quite difficult to convince them,” Kucera told Czech reporters.