The Indelible Bonobo Experience

abstaining is also voting, just like atheism is a religion

Children playing on a broken wall in the Vel’ka Ida Roma settlement, in eastern Slovakia. The massive US Steel factory is visible in the background. Photos by Matt Lutton. (via The New Roma Ghettos | VICE United States)

• 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. 
• 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 neighbor.
• 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.”
• 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 sympathizer 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.”
• 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 neighbors. 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.
• 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 Czech village of Chotěbuz, a 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. 
• In 2005, an initiative co-sponsored by the EU, the European Commission, and the World Bank, among other organizations, 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 marginalized Roma by Slovakian municipalities, only 18 percent have actually reached marginalized 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. 
• 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.
• 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 labor 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.”
• 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. 
• 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.”
• 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
• 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 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.
• 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 sterilization 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 labor, 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!” 
• 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 neighbors 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.
• 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. 
• 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. 

• As early as 1939, adult male Gypsies could be sent to disciplinary labor 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.  (..) 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.  “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.”

Also: “Plight of the Roma: A look at Roma life around the world, as we mark International Roma Day.”