Roma Facing a Wave of Terror

In the early morning hours of 19 April, perpetrators who still remain at large threw three Molotov cocktails into the home of a Roma family in the village of Vítkov, Czech Republic. The ensuing blaze injured three people, including a two-year-old girl who is still fighting for her life in the Ostrava Teaching Hospital, where she is being treated for second and third-degree burns over 80 % of her body. The grandmother of the family saw a car in front of the house and heard a man yelling „Hey, Gypsies, burn!” before it drove away. The water mains to the house had been shut off prior to the attack and the house was completely destroyed.

Police say they have identified the vehicle and even the passengers, but have charged no one for lack of evidence. Despite the fact that police clearly classified the attack as arson committed by people from outside the house, irrational local rumours persist that the family set the fire themselves. Since the attack, they have been housed in a temporary shelter, an eight-meter-square flat in back of a veterinary clinic. While almost a million Czech crowns in donations have been collected by the town on their behalf for the purchase of a new home, no one wants the family to move in next to them, and the few offers of real estate they have received have been followed by groups of neighbours visiting the town hall to protest against the family moving in there. Meanwhile, Czech internet chat rooms visited by neo-Nazis threaten to „finish the job”. Just like two-year-old Natálka, the family remains in a state of limbo, with no clear way out of their situation.

This particular arson attack was followed by yet another on a Roma family, fortunately unsuccessful, during May in the village of Zdiby, not far from Prague. These attacks, the rise in neo-Nazi activity across the country during the past year, and the impunity with which the perpetrators operate are one reason so many Czech Roma are once again fleeing to Canada, mirroring a similar exodus during the mid-1990s that caused Canada to institute a visa requirement for all Czech citizens (lifted in 2007).

Neo-Nazi demonstrations and attempted pogroms in the Czech Republic cost taxpayers millions during the run-up to the recent EP elections. Requiring the presence of 1 000 police officers, the November 2008 neo-Nazi riots in Litvínov were the largest police action in the country since the anti-IMF/World Bank demonstrations in Prague in the year 2000. The neo-Nazi Worker’s Party (Dělnická strana) has been the primary organizer of recent events attended by neo-Nazis intent on committing violence, and the party can now look forward to receiving three-quarters of a million crowns from the Czech state for having made it past the 1 % threshold in the recent polls.

Recent Roma asylum seekers from the Czech Republic have included Anna Poláková, a well-known Roma programming editor at Czech Radio who has fled the country for fear of her family’s safety. Her experience of the Czech justice system is quite instructive: Skinheads beat her son unconscious and were fortunately apprehended by police during the act, and civil and criminal courts found the perpetrators guilty, with the civil court awarding the victim compensation for his rights having been violated. So far, so good. However, when two of the perpetrators failed to pay up and the family sued for their sentencing to be enforced, the family then became subjected to persecution. Their addresses were revealed to the perpetrators and their associates, who began following Poláková’s husband around, threatening and then assaulting him in an effort to extort the return of the compensation already paid to the family. Police were unable to protect them, so the family is now living with other asylum-seekers in the town of Hamilton, just outside Toronto.

The Czech authorities have recently cracked down on several ringleaders of the neo- Nazi movement, with police from the Organized Crime Detection Unit raiding the homes of 10 neo-Nazis involved in the National Resistance (Národní odpor) organization, including the Hate Core Shop in Prague. Five are now in custody, while the rest were released on their own recognizance. Neo-Nazis across the country held protests against the police raids, and the press recently reported that the children of Czech Prime Minister Fischer and Interior Minister Pecina are now under police protection, as the extremists are committed to revenging themselves against what they call on their websites the „pro-Zionist system”.

A concerted effort must be made by the authorities in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany and Slovakia to see that promoters of Nazism end up behind bars and are unable to carry out their violent intentions. Even when they are not the target of violence, Roma in the Czech Republic continue to suffer the anti-Roma attitude of the general public, manifested in discrimination in all areas of life, which translates into tacit support for the neo-Nazis’ behaviour. Most people in the Czech Republic are indifferent to what motivated Natálka’s attackers; all they do know is they don’t want the Roma as neighbours.