A habitat to build humanity across social divide

"We already pulled out whites from there," Petr Kudela, deputy mayor of Slezka Ostrava, reported to international investigators. "We explicitly told the Gypsies that they should not think that they will get apartments somewhere else than Hrusov. Do you really think that I should place them among our normal people?"

A poll last year showed that 80 percent of Czechs would resent a Roma neighbor and 45 percent would support deporting the Roma population, which is estimated at 300,000 in the Czech Republic. So, with tensions running high in Ostrava, it has not been easy to find Czech families willing to live in the village with Roma. Novák is among those few Czechs eager to join the project.

"Czechs have a lot of false stereotypes about Roma, that they steal or are dirty," he says. "I grew up near Roma, so I know many Roma I would put my hand in the fire for. I don't want to live in a monotonous society with only one kind of people."

For Novák's Roma colleague, Gorol, the village is both a chance to hold a steady job for the first time and a way out of the isolation he experiences as a Roma: "I don't want to be shut off in some ghetto. Czechs and Roma have a lot to learn from one another. The Coexistence Village is our only chance."

Roma neighborhoods are now home to village founder Vishwanathan, who came to the Czech Republic in 1991, after marrying a Czech classmate while studying physics in Moscow.

He admits that he knew little about race relations problems in the Czech Republic, until he was attacked by skinheads on the street in 1992. At the time, he was teaching at a British-Czech high school. "I began to lose purpose and meaning in my work, because the school was so elite," says Vishwanathan.

So, after the 1997 flood, Vishwanathan decided to get involved. He moved into makeshift shelters with Roma people and tried to prevent an inter-ethnic conflict when Czech residents protested and harassed the Roma evacuees.

"I thought I could calm things down in two or three months and go back to teaching, but I began to see huge problems. Now, I guess I'll be working on this until I die," Vishwanathan says.

Jan Svozil, mayor of Slezka Ostrava, claims that no one lives in Hrusov's destroyed buildings today, but a walk through the rubble-strewn streets proves otherwise.

Some buildings are no more than skeletons, roofless and with gaping holes in the walls. Everything is covered with the dust of brown coal burned by nearby factories.

When Vishwanathan makes his rounds here in Hrusov, children run to him, and adults lean out of windows to tell him their troubles and ask his advice. "I admire Kumar immensely for what he has done for the Roma and for the whites too," says Anna Micková, a Czech resident of Hrusov. "The situation is critical here. The authorities just ignored Hrusov until Kumar got involved."

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