Patrik Banga: Romani extremists? Russian propagandists are laughing most of all

On Sunday I was glad to see how nicely the event in Pardubice started off. A representative of the Czech Police arrived and explained at what point things stood, the Romani people thanked her and applauded her. At the same time, enough of them had assembled to draw attention to the fact that they are unhappy about their security situation. It was a non-violent, peaceful protest.

How to hijack a demonstration

Then David Mezei showed up. I have probably never seen a demonstration turn around to such a degree as happened then. It went from being peaceful to being a textbook example of hatred, collective guilt, violence and racism. Were those things not usually associated with Romani people? Now they are.

Mezei’s speech turned the crowd into a bunch of fanatics. This is the same Mezei who has been making extremist speeches for several years now, the same one who fraternized with extremists from the Workers’ Social Justice Party (DSSS) on Letná – where, by the way, the recently-paroled murderer of the Romani man Ota Absolon, Vlastimil Pechanec, was also in attendance. (Just as a point of interest, later that evening after the demonstration in Pardubice, Mezei invited onto his Facebook livestream Denis Novák, founder of the ‘Round Table Alliance’, who in 2022 was an invited speaker to the DSSS convention. He then advised Mezei on how to establish a militia.). This is the same Mezei who has been collecting money from impoverished Romani people to live his life, travel to Italy, and even fundraised to allegedly look for missing children.

What happened next looked absolutely, exactly like a DSSS event in Krupka or elsewhere in northern Bohemia. A march, slogans like “We were here first” or “This is our home”, abuse and threats toward Ukrainians, who according to Mezei are all knife-wielding and should go back where they came from. That was followed by abuse of “nonprofits”, bureaucrats… in short, everything belonging to a proper extremist demonstration. The main star of the afternoon was David Mezei, who repeatedly made threats to kill people in his posted and streamed videos.

Take all of those shouted slogans, replace the word “Ukrainians” with “Roma” or “Jews”, and you have a textbook example of collective guilt interwoven with racism. In other words, the very thing most of us Roma have been resisting from others our entire lives. Is that ok? I guess it seems so to some. This is simply not ok, though.

Why are some Roma open to the simple solutions of Romani extremists?

Why did so many people travel to an event convened by an extremist? Why do so many people follow him? Why did young girls run up to him during the march and want to take selfies with him? The answer, basically, is ruefully simple.

Nobody here listens to the impoverished, less-educated Roma. In Mezei, they’ve found somebody who shouts so loudly that he makes himself heard. Because he shouts, the media follow him, in addition to the Romani people themselves. Mezei is interesting to the media because they are ignorant of the fact that in the past he has turned similar performances into a rather solid business. The Roma don’t care. The main thing is that they have a voice in him.

If a police officer or a politician were to do the work of watching Mezei’s videos, they would discover that the Romani people following him and responding to his tirades are expressing fears in unison over social security and the related economic situation. They fear having nowhere to live, because the housing issue is even more complicated than ever before now that the Ukrainians are arriving here. The same goes for employment. On top of all of those complications, we now have these conflicts. One ended tragically for a young Romani man from Brno, killed by a Ukrainian. The central subject, therefore, has logically become security. If one is afraid, one does whatever one can to stop feeling that way.

Interior Minister Rakušan is meant to aid with resolving this complicated situation, and eventually he did so. When, though, did he take action? After the Brno conflict, he called for interethnic relations not to escalate. After the conflict in Pardubice, he downplayed the matter, saying that several hundred crimes happen every day in the Czech Republic. It was not until after the demonstration called for by Mezei that the Interior Minister responded and assured Romani people in a video message that nobody will side with the Ukrainians in these matters. Almost a month has passed since the death of a Romani man in Brno. It’s not surprising why some impoverished, less-educated people are joining the extremists.

After all, the police will never officially report that the assailants in either Brno or Pardubice were citizens of Ukraine. That makes it look as if they are obfuscating. The police will never publicly say what they will do to provide more security for the Romani people in their localities, although to do so would certainly contribute to calming the situation. Basically, nobody is involved with the Romani “question” at the central level, despite the fact that this is the second such demonstration to be convened by Romani people. If another such conflict happens, more people will turn out for the next demonstration. Hundreds, then thousands. It will get really ugly.

Romani people are not idiots, they see the double standard at work here. I repeatedly remind everybody how the Romani Ukrainians were the ones sleeping on the streets of Brno or on the floor of the main railway station in Prague. Ethnic Ukrainians (by which I mean white ones) were sent straight into some kind of housing upon arriving. I encounter Ukrainians in Prague absolutely everywhere. After the tents were pitched outdoors for them last year, I never encountered a single Romani Ukrainian in Prague. It might also be appropriate to say at this point that the non-Romani Ukrainians themselves refused to ride on the same buses as the Romani Ukrainians, who had to be fetched by the organizations represented by Romani people here with their own separate buses.

The Czech authorities’ response? So little as to be almost nothing. If the nonprofit sector did not exist, the Romani Ukrainians would have been much worse off. Now, tell me the truth. Have you ever heard a single Ukrainian person here criticize the approach taken by the Czech authorities towards their Romani fellow citizens? Maybe I missed it, but I’ve noticed no such thing.

The double standard

For 30 years we have been addressing the fact that Czech Romani people have quite a complicated housing situation, but in the case of the Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s full-fledged invasion, their housing was resolved with lightning speed. I have also repeatedly criticized the approach taken by public broadcaster Czech Television, which organized Ukrainian-language broadcasting for those seeking temporary protection in a mere 27 days. We Roma have been and still are waiting for just such a program for 25 years. I could reiterate several such comparisons.

The local milieu has become so fanatical that one is afraid to write about one’s own experiences with Ukrainians for fear of being abused as a pro-Russian cockroach. That is exactly what happened to me when I described in a Facebook post how I was assaulted recently by three Ukrainians who called me a ‘gypsy’ and threatened to beat me up just because I asked them to stop blocking the road down which I needed to drive.

Don’t be surprised, therefore, that these relations are so tense. The approach taken by the authorities, the Government and the police is to blame. I don’t find it amusing anymore, either. I see the double standard with my own eyes and on top of that, everybody lies to me as a citizen here.

A debate on television recently claimed that the crime rate among foreign nationals does not deviate from the norm here – but the statistics year-on-year clearly show that crimes committed by foreign nationals have risen by one-third to a total of 8427. It is exactly Ukrainians who have the biggest number on their consciences (2568), closely followed by Slovaks, who committed just five fewer crimes last year.

For 30 years I have been listening to bullshit about the crime committed by Romani people, but when there are numbers available which clearly state that the crime committed by foreign nationals has risen by one-third, there is silence about that fact. Why? Can I come to any other conclusion than this feeling of a double standard?

The Russian propagandists are having a field day

It’s the Russians who have to be laughing most of all. I wouldn’t be surprised if Russian propaganda has been working flat-out to support these conflicts between Roma and Ukrainians. When two guys fight each other, the third one just laughs.

Whom does it serve for interethnic relations to be tense in the Czech Republic? In addition to the local racists, of whom we also have more than enough here, this is mostly to the advantage exactly of the Russians. They’re the ones who know how to do this the best. It’s enough to watch a few documentaries about what the Russians know how to do on social media. Then all it takes is to reflect on where, in addition to the scenes of physical conflict, all of these events are basically being born.