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The authorities sign off on internal exile


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April 11th, 2007 issue

International Roma Day fell on Easter Sunday, an event that signifies hope for many — but it’s a sour irony in a country where things are only getting worse for this long-established Czech minority.

Last fall, then Mayor Jiří Čunek and his colleagues at Vsetín town hall ousted dozens of Romany, or Gypsy, families from their ramshackle apartment building, supposedly for failing to pay rent.
Whether that’s true is a point of debate. What’s clear is that Vsetín forced families to sign new mortgages on houses that town officials knew were distant and dangerous.
Five families were trucked away from their hometown Oct. 13 and deposited that night in the Jeseník region, over 100 kilometers (62 miles) to the north, and assigned to houses they say they had never seen. But Vsetín officials, by their own admission, had visited the homes, knew exactly what their condition was and found them just fine. For the Roma, anyway.
It’s nigh on impossible to imagine authorities couldn’t see the rot and disrepair already claiming these lean-tos.
A broken toilet occupies a dirty little corner of one house. Every couple of days, when raw sewage threatens to claim part of the bathroom floor, someone has to throw waste out the bathroom window.
Another house sits among ruins of other structures, including a crippled barn. Last winter, snow accumulated on its roof and it caved in. By sheer luck, the kids weren’t playing under it at the time.
This house also has no potable water, only well water laced with bacteria that are likely the cause of the children’s rashes. Now the family must spend part of its welfare money on pricey bottled water.  
A third house has an attic floor that quivers under the weight of just one person. Part of the rotting attic has already yielded, causing a hole in the ceiling downstairs.
That officials could call these structures acceptable says much about what they think of the people whom they are planning to move in.
The cold night the families arrived, they slept on dirt-covered concrete floors, “like dogs,” as one mother put it.
And, though Vsetín officials knew that small children would live in every house, they never bothered to fix an ungrounded electrical system in the house assigned to Karel Kandrač. It sends live current through exposed pipes and heaters. His 3-year-old granddaughter suffered electrical shock when she accidentally touched a radiator near the toilet. Meanwhile, her lungs were likely under assault from the festering mold on the bathroom walls.
Would Vsetín officials have ever considered moving non-Roma families to buildings that should by all rights be condemned?
Such questions demand immediate attention, without even taking on the debate about whether these families should have been evicted at all — or, if so, how a small town mayor in Moravia has the authority to send families into what is essentially internal exile.
More curious still is how some of those banished to these hinterlands became identified as “problem” Roma, and therefore first on the truck to Jeseník. It seems that, in at least one case, that of the Kandrač family, they qualified primarily because of their involvement in the Roma Civic Initiative, a group that has criticized Čunek.
As international human rights organizations continue to press the Czech Republic to update its social policies to basic modern standards, you need only think of Kandrač’s granddaugther and her nearly fatal trip to the bathroom to see where we really stand.


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