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September 7th, 2008

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Cast out

Forced from homes in Vsetín, east Moravia, by ex-Mayor Čunek, Roma cope with new housing that shows the ruin of relocation

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
April 11th, 2007 issue

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST

František Žiga's family was coerced into taking a mortgage on a dilapidated house after being forcibly evicted from its home.
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František Žiga isn’t quite sure where the all the large sores on his face came from. Maybe, he says, it’s something he picked up from dealing with the sewage his family produces in their broken toilet. Or it could be from the stress of his new life far from his hometown, as the only man in a 13-person household.

Žiga, 22, is a member of one of the five Romany, or Gypsy, families evicted from the town of Vsetín, east Moravia, last October and sent about 100 kilometers (62 miles) away, to the Jeseník region, to live in dilapidated houses. The stories of these families once more call into question policies that, according to many, have led to disastrous consequences for Roma not just in Jeseník but across the Czech Republic.

Žiga, who is otherwise a young man of dark good looks and brooding expression, picks at his scabby crimson sores as he recounts the story of his eviction from Vsetín and new life in sleepy Vlčice. His pretty girlfriend sits next to him and tends to their 5-month-old daughter, Melissa. Other small children, his bright-eyed siblings, run among the few habitable rooms wearing dirty clothes.

Žiga says Vsetín officials told his mother, who is illiterate, that she had to sign the mortgage of a house she had never seen or she would lose her children. His father couldn’t handle the stress and took off.

“The mental strain is the worst because we are used to being together, with my grandmother,” Žiga says. Like others in relocated families, he had to leave his extended family back in Vsetín. Nobody wanted to come to Vlčice. But it seems they had little choice.

“At town hall, they threw the mortgage contract at us. So we didn’t know we were going here. We were under pressure. Everybody was under pressure. They threatened that if we didn’t sign they would put us in the street and take our kids,” Žofia Kandráčová, a 42-year-old cousin of Žiga’s who was sent to live in nearby Stará Červená Voda, says.

Kandráčová’s house is costing her and her husband 430,000 Kč ($20,525) even though it was barely livable when they arrived. “We had to sleep like dogs on the floor,” she says. The house still has no potable water and her daughter needs to wash her hair with bottled water because the dirty well water gave her a crusty rash on the back of her neck.

Kandráčová arrived around midnight Oct. 14, the same time as the other families were dropped off. She said she didn’t know when she was moving until the trucks showed up at her Vsetín home and workers started loading her possessions. When the 15 family members got to their new house, they found a filthy cement shack.

Since the move, plaster has fallen off the walls onto the children and part of the barn’s roof has collapsed.

Her cousin, social worker Karel Kandráč, was moved to a house in Vidnava, another nearby town. Although his place has drinking water, it offers few other comforts. Live wires stick out of walls and already there have been two electrical fires. The electricity isn’t grounded, so the heating pipes and radiators carry a current.

One time, when all 12 members of Kandráč’s family were living there, his 3-year-old granddaughter touched the bathroom heater and started to shake. Eight family members, including the little girl, have since moved back to Vsetín to live with relatives.

“I see zero future because my family is disintegrated,” Kandráč says. “Out of 12 we are four left.”

He shares the house with his wife, Emílie, and their two sons. The boys, 12 and 15, live in a room that once had a hole in the ceiling where part of the attic had fallen through. Kandráč patched it with cement.

In the attic, he points to wooden beams rotting or being eaten by termites and lightly jumps on the floor to demonstrate its instability. The whole room bounces.

Downstairs, in the living room in which he and his wife laid linoleum to cover the cement, Kandráč recalls the circumstances of his move.

He says he was told the night before the move that he would be going to a different region. The next day he went to town hall and the deputy mayor gave him a contract to sign. When he came home, workers were already loading his belongings onto a truck. He couldn’t find the insulin they packed and got sick.

“We had no idea about the mortgage; they included it in the contract,” he says. That night he arrived at his 425,000 Kč house.

He believes he was moved so far away because of his involvement with the activist group Roma Civic Initiative.

Conflicting stories
The mayor of Vsetín at the time of the evictions was Jiří Čunek, now the scandal-ridden deputy prime minister and chairman of the Christian Democrats. Čunek says the dozens of Romany families living in the apartment building in downtown Vsetín were evicted for not paying rent. But Kandráč says this is impossible: Rent was deducted from their welfare.

However, according to Kandráč, the families did have a huge collective water bill they couldn’t pay. He says this is because the town took its time responding to a request to fix a running tap.

But Vsetín spokeswoman Eva Stejskalová says there were no bills for water and that several factors complicated the deduction of rent from the families’ benefits: Sometimes there wasn’t enough to cover rent or it went to other debts or payments.

Stejskalová says people from town hall saw the Jeseník houses and found them acceptable. She adds there was no pressure on the families to take the houses but also says, “These people had a choice — they knew they had no legal claim for housing — so they could choose to either go and live on the street or take up the offer of the houses.”

The container houses on the outskirts of Vsetín to which 36 families were sent were too small for these families, Stejskalová says.

Although the families said they had no advance warning of the move, newspaper articles as early as August 2006 included statements from Čunek on his intent to move them.

Čunek, through Christian Democrat spokesman Martin Horálek, declined to answer questions for this article.

Kandráč says Čunek created the problem in Vsetín by moving Romany families from other parts of town into the central apartment building. It’s no wonder, he says, that there were noise complaints from the nearby hospital.

“Čunek created ghettoes of the Roma community and then they were easily attacked,” he says.

Kandráč says Čunek is dangerous to the Roma community and fears his actions will set an example for other towns. Last week, another Moravian town, Nový Jičín, evicted Romany tenants from their homes for allegedly not paying rent.

Still, the displaced Vsetín families are looking forward to the day they can move back to their hometown. For now, they are waiting to see what the Czech courts will do with the charges they filed against Vsetín. If the families aren’t successful, they will take the case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

“Hope never dies,” Kandráč says. “It will take a few years before we get back.”

Naďa Černá contributed to this report.

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com

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