Czech racial segregation in history: Roma and their allies committed civil disobedience against the building of the wall in Matiční Street 25 years ago
Twenty-five years ago, an opaque wall made out of prefabricated parts was installed on Matiční Street in Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic to separate the single-family homes of longterm, non-Romani residents from buildings owned by the city where the inhabitants were predominantly Romani. The local authority had the wall built on 13 October 1999. The construction was 1.8 meters tall and 60 meters long and was removed six weeks later under pressure from the Czech Government after the protests of Czech and other human rights defenders abroad who saw it as a sign of racism.
The prelude to this controversial episode in the history of not just Ústí nad Labem, but of the Czech Republic and indeed Europe, was City Hall’s decision to relocate Romani residents into the apartment buildings in Matiční Street on the outskirts of the city between the Labe River and the railway tracks, which featured with undivided, wraparound verandas on every floor. City Hall said it would be moving rent defaulters into the buildings.
Shortly after the relocation in 1994, the owners of the single-family homes located across from the complex of four tenements began complaining of noise and trash. The longterm, non-Romani residents wrote a petition and asked that a wall be built to separate them from the municipally-owned apartment buildings. In September 1998, the Municipal Department of Neštěmice, which has jurisdiction over Matiční Street, decided to accede to that request.
The building of the wall was criticized from abroad, by the Czech Government, and by Czech President Václav Havel. Romani activists and their allies dismantled it.
Already ahead of the building of the wall, voices against the idea of separating the predominantly Romani residents of the tenements from the rest of the neighborhood started to be heard. In August 1998, for example, the Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination of the United Nations, based in Geneva, contacted the Czech Government with a request for information as to how it intended to take measures to eliminate efforts to isolate particular groups in Czech municipalities. In late September 1998, a group of specialists on Romani issues from the Council of Europe came to Matiční Street to map the situation, followed by representatives of the UN Human Rights Commission. The building of the wall was criticized by Czech President Václav Havel and the scandal was also reported on internationally.
The Czech Government also tried in January 1999 to persuade the leadership of Ústí nad Labem to revoke the plan to build the wall, but in vain. After delays of different kinds and a failed attempt by high-ranking politicians to prevent its construction, the wall began to be installed on Matiční Street at the start of October 1999. Prefabricated ceramic and concrete replaced the existing chainlink fence, which made it possible to still hear and see the Romani tenants, but the wall was not fully installed until a second try on 13 October.
Romani human rights defenders and their allies first prevented the building of the wall by occupying the site and then, once the installation started, by dismantling it. The wall was also dismantled, for example, by a state bureaucrat, Jan Jařab, and by Ladislav Lis, a member of the Czech Government Human Rights Council and the Czech Helsinki Committee.
Romani people traveled to Matiční Street from all over Bohemia, such as the cities of Chrudim, Liberec, Most, Nový Bor and Rokycany, to protest the building of the wall. After workers demolished the original chainlink fence, those Roma stood between the concrete columns for the new ceramic wall and prevented the construction company from continuing the work.
Romani women and men visited the site carrying placards reading “We are human beings first and foremost”, “We want to work = conditions are not equal” and “Matiční is a symbol of hate and racism.” One sign depicted barbed wire and the wall, reading “Roma in the Czech Republic, discrimination, racism, down with the fence in Matiční”.
The workers did not manage to build the wall until 13 October, starting their second try before 4 AM. As many as 80 municipal police, who were unarmed, first formed a cordon around the construction site, after which the construction machinery arrived and the installation started.
Immediately afterward, the criticism further intensified. The building of the wall was being criticized by the EU, for example, whose Commissioner for Enlargement, Günter Verheugen, called the installation a human rights violation and asked the Czech Government to quickly resolve the situation. According to the US Congress, the wall symbolized intolerance and racism toward Romani people.
There was no change in the local authority’s attitude until the Czech Government promised to provide CZK 10 million [EUR 400,000] toward “improving coexistence among local residents”. The Ústí nad Labem assembly members approved accepting this subsidy on 23 November 1999 and the wall disappeared.
Using roughly one-third of the Government subsidy, City Hall bought out the owners of the three single-family homes immediately adjacent to the municipally-owned apartments. Their owners then moved away and many Romani people also moved out of the municipally-owned units. Local police ran a station out of one of the bought-out homes for several years, while the People in Need NGO opened a community center in another of the bought-out homes and started holding programs for local Romani children there. Some of the subsidy was distributed by City Hall to reconstruct social apartment units and to undertake various social projects.
Tenements gradually demolished, just one still standing today
Today, all that is left of the tensions over the wall in Matiční Street is just the last of the four tenements. The first such apartment building, which belonged to City Hall, was demolished by the local authority one year after the wall was removed, with the other two being demolished in the summer of 2022. By now, there is just one tenement still standing, the doors and windows of which have been bricked up, and it belongs to the České přístavy [Czech Ports] company. The city has been negotiating with that company for several years about the fate of this last building in the complex, but has not yet reached an agreement about buying it out and demolishing it. The wall itself ended up being used as a fence at the Ústí nad Labem Zoo, which purchased the prefabricated parts at an auction in the summer of 2000 for roughly CZK 200,000 [EUR 8,000].
The building of the wall sparked great emotion at the time, and resolutions about it were even adopted by the Chamber of Deputies, but local politicians in Ústí nad Labem defend the decision to install it to this day. “If anybody asks me whether we would proceed the same way today, I say yes. Those people [i.e., the homeowners] were suffering here, we got several petitions about the disruption to nighttime quiet and the trash. We did our best to come to their aid. We replaced the old, rusty fence with one that would block noise and trash,” said Deputy Mayor Pavel Tošovský (then a member of the Civic Democratic Party – ODS) two years ago, who was Mayor of the Municipal Department of Neštěmice in 1999.
The scandal resulted in several court judgments. In December 2001, for example, the High Court in Prague rejected a lawsuit from a resident of Matiční Street, Gizela Lacková, against the local authority. Lacková had been living in one of the municipally-owned apartment buildings at the time, and she demanded an apology and CZK 100,000 [EUR 4,000] for the fact that the installation of the wall in Matiční Street by representatives of Ústí nad Labem violated her dignity and honor.
In April 2000, the Czech Constitutional Court overturned part of the Chamber of Deputies’ resolution of October 1999 in which the lawmakers annulled the decision by the local assembly of Neštěmice to make building repairs, including the construction of the wall on Matiční Street. The fact that the legislators had made a decision about a resolution adopted by a local authority breached their competence under the Constitution, according to Judge Antonín Procházka, the rapporteur on the case.
