65 years ago, Czechoslovakia banned life on the road: Did the communists destroy Romani culture and engineer their social exclusion?

The discriminatory law threatened anybody who lived on the road with prison and was not formally revoked until late March of 1998. At least, that is how the Czech News Agency (ČTK) has recently reported on this history.

Romani Studies scholar Jan Ort has objected to the conclusions implied by the analysis published by the wire service. The consequences of that 1958 law and other measures under the former regime to manage Romani assimilation are said to be still apparent to this day.

ČTK reports that it was exactly the forced resettlement of Romani people and their segregation into closed neighborhoods in various towns that yielded many of today’s “socially excluded” localities. The efforts of the regime to include Romani people in society also reportedly intensified the majority society’s grievances against them.

According to the ČTK analysis, the denial of the identity of Roma and their difference, including their cultural difference, contributed to that outcome, as did some material advantages which existed for Roma during the previous regime. The communists reportedly destroyed Romani community solidarity from within by attacking the pillars on which their culture had been based for centuries.

The assimilation was not just about destroying that culture physically, but about dismantling their culture spiritually; Romani people were meant to become regular Czechoslovaks without a trace of their former, distinct “g*psy origin”. After 1948, they were first made equal in a formal sense, but in social terms they still remained on the fringes.

The efforts of the regime targeted re-educating and gradually ridding “citizens of g*psy origin of the consequences of their backwardness as an inheritance from the capitalist regime”. Emphasis was placed on eliminating illiteracy, and various educational and socializational courses for adults were opened.

From the mid-1950s, in accordance with a concept of politics that was Stalinist, the regime moved toward assimilation as their open policy vis à vis the Roma, the aim of which was to eliminate “the backwardness of g*psies in social terms”, to reeducate them, and then for them to merge with the majority population. The barrier to achieving this aim was declared to be what were called “ethnocultural Romani specifics” – their culture, the Romanes language, their traditions and their values – which were considered the chief source of their “backwardness”.

Living on the road was labeled as one of these undesirable vestiges that had first been addressed in legal terms by a law from the First Czechoslovak Republic of 1927 targeting “wandering g*psies and persons living in the g*psy way”. However, in practice, it meant constant official and police surveillance of almost all Romani people, whether they lived on the road or not.

The 1958 law ordered Romani people to settle exactly wherever the authorities caught up with them, and municipalities were meant to provide them with substitute accommodation and give them jobs. Whoever did not accept this “aid” was imprisoned.

From the standpoint of its declared aims, the implementation of this law ended up being a total fiasco, according to historian Michal Schuster. “If the legislation and the subsequent registration yielded any positives (improving the overall records on Romani people, adding to the data and documentation of their residences, school-aged children and employees, etc.), those were mostly significantly limited in time,” Schuster has written.

Romani people, according to ČTK, did not get an opportunity to influence the solving of their own problems until the late 1960s, when the Union of Gypsies/Roma was allowed to be officially registered, but it was banned in 1973. From the early 1970s it began to be apparent that the forced assimilation model had not yielded the anticipated results.

The concept of assimilation managed by the state was then replaced with the concept of “integration”, which was milder, but its aim remained the same – to assimilate the Roma through the use of softer tools. According to the ČTK analysis, Romani people were awarded apartment units and given higher welfare benefits and other special financial contributions by the state.

ČTK claims that this approach of “conservation” paralyzed Romani people even further and is criticized in society to this day. Communist policy may have resulted in an equality that was formal for Roma, and it may have improved their material situation (through access to education and a better living standard), but by suppressing their ethnicity in a systematic way, it destroyed Romani cultural norms and traditional ties, and in the Czech Republic, society is struggling with the repercussions of that to this day.

Jan Ort, Romani Studies scholar, critiques the ČTK perspective on the postwar history of Romani people as replete with stereotypes

Romani Studies scholar Jan Ort has objected to the analysis published by ČTK, criticizing it as embodying a stereotypical view of the postwar history of Romani people. “There is a great deal to criticize about communist policy – in addition to the basic denial of the right to ethnocultural self-determination, one can recall, first and foremost, the policy of forcibly sterilizing Romani women. However, the frequently-repeated story about the communist regime destroying Romani culture is problematic from the start on more than one level,” he told news server Romea.cz.

The idea that a culture which had functioned for centuries was destroyed by two policies of a single political regime which were in effect for limited amounts of time is not supported by the facts, in Ort’s view. “In many of the approaches taken by the state toward Romani people here it is possible to see an unambiguous continuity across different political regimes, and not just before the communists rose to power, but also after 1989, ” Ort told Romea.cz.

Emphasizing the impacts of the 1958 law, in Ort’s view, supports the stereotypical view of Romani people as “traditional itinerants”, which contradicts what the reality of most Romani people in Czechoslovakia was. “The problem here was rather that the law, in practice, also affected Romani people who just traveled to work while their families had long lived (for centuries) in specific locations,” the Romani Studies scholar clarified to Romea.cz.

A frequent problem, in Ort’s view, is also that when assessing the assimilation policy in a wider sense, the perspective of Romani people themselves is ignored, paradoxically: “From different interviews with the eyewitnesses and from period materials it is apparent that Romani people themselves frequently had a positive relationship toward the policy then and saw it as an opportunity to acquire a place of full-fledged value in society. They had been grappling with their historically-rooted racial segregation, and in this centrally-managed policy that emphasized, among other matters, the elimination of the existing Romani settlements, they saw an opportunity to overcome such segregation. The central policy was often not the problem, the anti-Romani attitudes of local authorities and of non-Romani residents were the problem. Alleging that communist policy was behind the birth of the localities which are segregated is misleading, from that perspective.”

According to Ort, when Czechoslovak communist policy toward the Roma is framed in this one-sided way, it ultimately leads to the agency of Roma being pushed further into the background. “Romani people, in this story, seem to be defenseless victims who fought for ethnocultural self-determination just during the short time in which their organization, the union, was working in the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, the postwar history of the Roma can also be seen as the story of their maintaining their cultural values even under conditions, politically, which were not always receptive to them,” Ort told Romea.cz.

The frequently-repeated thesis that the communist regime’s paternalistic approach taught Romani people that it would be better for them not to take care of themselves is also unacceptable, in Ort’s view. “In that case in particular we have a genuinely dangerous claim that reproduces Romani stereotypes about abuse of state support and passively waiting for aid from the outside. However, what is happening first and foremost is that our attention is again switched to the allegedly problematic behavior of the Romani people themselves, diverting our attention away from anti-Romani racism as the primary cause of the disappointing socioeconomic situations of many Roma in the Czech Republic, if I connect this to the current discussion,” Ort said.