Slovakian Roma forced to ghettos
Defying EU pressure, Slovakia is systematically segregating its Romany minority into ghettos, and barring their entrance into cities.
Teenager Lucie David still has nightmares about the evening two years ago when local police and neo-Nazi skinheads attacked her family's home in the small town of Stos in eastern Slovakia.
"Rocks came smashing through the windows, and a crowd was outside chanting that they would rape me and my mother," she recalls in a whisper.
After huddling together in the dark for several hours, Lucie, her parents, and two brothers fled the village, never to return. That night was the terrifying climax of a year of terror: Her father had been jailed without charges and her older brother severely beaten by a policeman. The family had received several phone calls each day with the message: "Gypsies, get out of town or die."
The Davids' case is just one among hundreds documented by international human rights organizations that portray a trend of violent segregation of Romanies (commonly called Gypsies) in eastern Slovakia.
There are about 400,000 Slovak Roma, most living in squalid rural settlements and urban ghettos. More are being moved into segregated areas each month. Despite pressure from the European Union to reintegrate national minorities, several towns in eastern Slovakia have recently passed ordinances banning Roma from entering the city limits, let alone living inside them.
"The Romany population is being systematically segregated in Slovak society - in housing, in schools, you name it," says Claude Cahn, a researcher with the European Roma Rights Center, a Budapest-based legal group. "Since 1998, the situation has worsened in terms of skinhead violence and police violence. Prominent Slovak politicians are making radical statements about confining the Romany population and using mass sterilization to decrease their number."
The David family now lives in Lunik IX, a Romany slum on the edge of Slovakia's second-largest city, Kosice. Here, 5,000 people have been crammed into a complex built for half that number, and the city has cut off electricity, hot water, heat, and garbage collection.
Earlier this year, the last white Slovak family in Lunik IX was relocated by the city, making it the largest purely Romany ghetto in Slovakia and concluding a process started by Rudolf Schuster, then the mayor of Kosice and now president.
In 1997, the Kosice city council, headed by Schuster, announced a $50 million "city beautification project" to clean up the baroque city for tourism. Part of the plan was to evict some 25,000 Roma from the center and move them to segregated areas. An internal document, signed by former district mayor Andrej Weber and viewed by this reporter, designates Lunik IX as "small, substandard housing for Roma."
"Moving Roma to Lunik IX is a normal development," says Zdenko Trebula, the current mayor of Kosice. "If you know for a fact that a certain group of people is criminal and intolerable, of course you will not want them for neighbors. Besides, Roma don't pay the rent."
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