PR backfire: Prague politicians thanking volunteers for aiding refugees from Ukraine are protested against by volunteers reminding them Romani refugees were discriminated against
On the first anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Friday, 24 February, a press conference was held at the main railway station in Prague. Representatives of the capital city, the Central Bohemian Regional Authority, and several other institutions thanked the people who have been providing aid to those fleeing Ukraine.
During the press conference, volunteers from Iniciativa Hlavák, the group which has been assisting refugees at the main railway station, assembled with their own photographs of Romani Ukrainian refugees to recall the discrimination those people faced after arriving in Prague last year and the undignified conditions in which they had no choice but to live. Speakers during the morning press conference thanked all of the nonprofits, Prague residents, volunteers and others who have been providing aid for a year now in solidarity with those fleeing Ukraine.
“I appreciate everybody who was not indifferent to the fate of those fleeing this cruel wartime conflict. I would like to thank all those who assisted these people in need, from the professionals in all units of the integrated protection system, to the nonprofit staffers, to the volunteers who are residents of Prague and other cities,” newly-elected Mayor of Prague Bohuslav Svoboda said.
“These people demonstrated that Masaryk’s ideals of humanity, which were part of the birth of our republic, have not lost their appeal and live on,” the mayor said. Current First Vice-Mayor Zdeněk Hřib, who served as mayor until mid-February this year and who coordinated the aid for refugees after the beginning of the 2022 crisis, emphasized in his speech that “without the personal involvement of many Praguers, volunteers, the city’s crisis management, data management and the involvement of volunteer organizations as well as the collaboration with the regions, we would never have managed to care for almost 170,000 people in Prague and the Central Bohemian Region.”
Central Bohemian Regional Governor Petra Pecková and the Director-General of the Railway Administration, Jiří Svoboda, also made remarks. The event also opened an exhibition of photographs called “Stories of Gratitude” by the photographer Alžběta Jungrová, an exhibition of photographs by volunteers, and the unveiling of a statue called “Volunteers” at the station.
Thanks, but we’ll never forget how the Roma were treated
In the southern part of the Fantova building at the railway station, where the press conference took place, volunteers from Iniciativa Hlavák who played an essential role in aiding those arriving during the crisis assembled to remind everybody that not all refugees have been treated the same. “It was an awfully bizarre situation. At the place where Romani Ukrainian children had once been given just half a banana each because there was not enough food, a rich smorgasbord was spread out for the guests invited to the press conference. The volunteers from Iniciativa Hlavák sat down on the ground on blankets with their backs turned and photographs of the Romani Ukrainian children who once had to sleep on the floor of the main railway station on their backs. Some guy walked over to them with a walkie-talkie in his hand, did his best to order them away from that location and claimed that City Hall didn’t want them there,” photographer Petr Vrabec told news server Romea.cz.
After the press conference ended, Iniciativa Hlavák followed up the thank-you ceremony with its own event under the slogan “Thanks, but we’ll never forget”, which was held in the Vrchlický sady park in front of the railway station where, as with the protest in the Fantova building, they reminded passers-by of the undignified conditions and unequal treatment the Romani Ukrainians have faced. Romani activist Jozef Miker and former ombudswoman Anna Šabatová supported the assembly.
“When convening today’s gathering, we set ourself two aims. The first is to recall the discrimination that was racist and systemic and the undignified conditions that Romani Ukrainians faced upon their arrival to Prague. The second aim is to call for such a situation to never happen again,” said Veronika Dvorská from Iniciativa Hlavák in the opening of her speech.
“The impressive, remarkable aid system designed for those fleeing Ukraine, where during one day they were registered, granted temporary protection, given access to humanitarian accommodation, health insurance, humanitarian benefits and such, did not work for refugees of Romani origin for various reasons. The situation was always the same, Romani people came back to the main railway station because they had not been given access to the system, they got nothing, they had nowhere to go – however, the justifications for their rejection changed over time. In the media, the justification mentioned the most frequently was that of their so-called dual citizenship,” Dvorská emphasized.
“First of all, let’s unequivocally emphasize that the allegation that the Romani refugees arriving at the railway station were mostly Hungarians was and is absurd. While more than one politician (including several who were just thanking the volunteers a moment ago at the railway station) brandished that disinformation in their defense, the data show that less than 3 % of the refugees whose dual citizenship was vetted actually held more than one citizenship. What’s more, during our entire time working at the main railway station, we never encountered a single white refugee who had been subjected to vetting for dual citizenship,” Dvorská said.
PHOTO GALLERY
Full speech by Veronika Dvorská for Iniciativa Hlavák
Good afternoon,
We’ve planned this assembly of ours to supplement, shall we say, the event that took place today at 10:30 in the building of the main railway station. We comprehend the need to thank the volunteers, nonprofit and state-sponsored organizations. Nothing could have prepared us for the events of the past year and the challenges which we overcame together were of a genuinely historic nature. However, we don’t want this history to be written just by the “winners” and for the most vulnerable to be forgotten. We consider it crucial that the reflection on the events of the last year be an honest one. The proverbial solidarity wave was not the same for all Ukrainians fleeing the war.
When convening today’s gathering, we set ourself two aims. The first is to recall the discrimination that was racist and systemic and the undignified conditions that Romani Ukrainians faced upon their arrival to Prague. The second aim is to call for such a situation to never happen again. Let’s summarize once more what we witnessed here at the railway station.
The impressive, remarkable aid system designed for those fleeing Ukraine, where during one day they were registered, granted temporary protection, given access to humanitarian accommodation, health insurance, humanitarian benefits and such, did not work for refugees of Romani origins for various reasons. The situation was always the same, Romani people came back to the main railway station because they had not been given access to the system, they got nothing, they had nowhere to go – however, the justifications for their rejection changed over time. In the media, the justification mentioned the most frequently was that of their so-called dual citizenship. It’s interesting that such a justification came along relatively late, though.
From the beginning, Romani refugees were returning to us because they literally had not been allowed into the assistance center building. Later, after our colleagues from the Organization for Aid to Refugees (OPU) took legal action against that approach, Romani refugees began returning to us with even stranger justifications for their rejection. First, there was no stamp with the date of entry into the Schengen Area in their passports. Suddenly, just holding a Ukrainian passport was not enough, and in such a situation these refugees had no choice but to get on a train, go back to Slovakia, get a stamp in their passport, and return. They would receive no support until they did so. In our experience, if white refugees had no stamps in their passports, they could go to an assistance center to try their luck, and they had a decent chance of being treated humanely and being able to access the process of applying for temporary protection. Romani refugees did not have similar chances.
Another favorite argument was a lack of housing. Romani people frequently arrived as extended families who did not want to become separated, so they frequently were never awarded housing. Because they could not fill in the space marked “address” on the application form for temporary protection, their processes could not move forward. The state de facto said: Because we can’t manage to provide you housing, we won’t provide you any other aid either. Dozens of Romani families returned, therefore, to the main railway station with nothing and were told to wait. Maybe something would be found for them.
The only humanitarian housing that the state has provided long-term to the Romani families has been in detention facilities. These are guarded, isolated buildings surrounded with barbed wire. It’s no wonder many Romani refugees fled those buildings. I remember a young mother of two children (really hard to house, a “big” family), who showed up at the railway station after such an experience. When we asked her about the detention facility where she had been housed, she just said: “The prison? I got out of there.”
When the Romani refugees decided to leave the detention facilities, it meant that they were “refusing” the humanitarian housing to which they were entitled, and thereby they automatically lost their claim to other support. They became, once more, so-called “inadaptables”.
In addition to all of this, at the beginning of May, Romani refugees started turning up at the railway station who had returned from the assistance center with a document stating that it was necessary to check whether they didn’t have that notorious Hungarian citizenship. First of all, let’s unequivocally emphasize that the allegation that the Romani refugees arriving at the railway station were mostly Hungarians was and is absurd. While more than one politician (including several who were just thanking the volunteers a moment ago at the railway station) brandished that disinformation in their defense, the data show that less than 3 % of the refugees whose dual citizenship was vetted actually held more than one citizenship. What’s more, during our entire time working at the main railway station, we never encountered a single white refugee who had been subjected to vetting for dual citizenship.
The vetting could take as long as 14 days. Only after that time expired could the refugees return to the assistance center and apply for temporary protection. Until then, the state gave them nothing. The only thing they could do for that two weeks was to come back to us at the main railway station.
What awaited them at the railway station? The “Help Point” created under the auspices of City Hall was conceived of as a short-term stop, not a place where it would be possible to wait for a longer time with dignity. That plan, unfortunately, did not correspond to the lived reality of Romani refugees. The vetting for dual citizenship took as long as 14 days, and the refugees who had left the detention centers didn’t even have that prospect. According to the original idea, the arriving refugees were meant to receive basic information, refreshments, and urgent medical aid at the railway station, to spend one night there in exceptional cases, and then to move on.
Iniciativa Hlavák closely collaborated on running the Help Point with OPU. The distribution of our competences can be simply described as follows: Iniciativa Hlavák was in charge of communicating “downward”, recruiting, training, and running the volunteer operation, while OPU oversaw the project and communicated with the security forces and other institutions. As of May, the organization RomPraha joined our daily operations, medical examinations were provided by Teaching Hospital 3, and railway firefighters and administrators were involved in our operations on a daily basis, all under the auspices of City Hall. Many stakeholders, many approaches, many interests, but we all probably agreed on one thing: the building of a fully-functioning railway station is an extremely inappropriate location for hundreds of people to live for a longer time. Nobody would have chosen that solution. The refugees were here, though, and it was necessary to provide for their basic needs. Let’s focus on what kind of food and lodging for the night awaited the Romani refugees here.
The food provision was conceived of as snacks, not something one could survive on. The Romani refugees lived for many long days just on apples, instant noodle soups, and sandwiches. There wasn’t even enough of those. On the Help Point’s peak days, as many as 500 people slept at the railway station. However, what regularly happened was that however many people we reported as needing food, we always got just 200 portions. The donated food supplies had to be distributed around the corner, in the park, semi-secretly, because of public hygiene rules.
So much for the food – what about sleeping? A waiting room was created on the second floor of the Fantova building with 75 beds, medical services, and diaper-changing stations for mothers with infants, senior citizens and disabled people. Soon the capacity of the waiting room was far from meeting all the need. Each evening it was necessary to walk through the railway station and choose which of the very vulnerable people there were the most vulnerable. Only children and their mothers were vegetating at the railway station at that time.
Everybody else was able to sleep in a parked train car. It was not a sleeping car, but a regular car with seats housing up to 250 people with no privacy. Even that was frequently not enough, though. Whoever didn’t fit into the train or was afraid to sleep there, which is comprehensible for many reasons, was forced to sleep in the corridor. It was nothing exceptional for more than 100 children and their mothers to be sleeping on blankets laid out in the hall of the railway station. Each night they got a maximum of four hours’ sleep. Disinfection of all surface areas was introduced at the railway station, always at 10 PM and then 4 AM. The entire hall had to be cleared for disinfection. Everybody had to wake up, be led out to the sidewalk along the highway, and wait there. After the cleaning process, it was necessary to air out the entire hall so any dangerous disinfection fumes would not linger, which lasted at least half an hour more. Breakfast was served at just one time so as to make sure the absurdly scant food supplies could be divided equally, it wasn’t possible to sleep longer.
One could speak for hours about the conditions at the railway station. The gradually disappearing benches in the hall, the multiplying barricades, the two showers at the railway station that had to be shared by hundreds of people and where, for “mysterious reasons”, the hose extensions would be inexplicably unscrewed before the staffers from Iniciativa Hlavák, OPU, and RomPraha managed to bring the refugees there to wash.
For me personally, my strongest memories of that time at the main railway station mostly involve children. Infants just a few months old sleeping in the corridor of the railway station, stultified under a blanket when even mothers with genuinely tiny babies couldn’t fit them into the bed. Children who in the beginning did their best to play, but to whom everything was forbidden – if they rode the escalators, the guards threw them off, if they wanted to leave the area designated, barricades were erected. We did our best, more than once, to ask for a children’s corner, just a table with crayons; it was always rejected. Children who were active in the beginning just sat with broken spirits in the corridors – on the ground, because the benches were taken away.
We waited for the outdoor refugee camps to open as if for mercy. Even then, though, the problems at the railway station were far from over. The so-called “front desk”, which had been run since the end of May at the railway station by the Aliens Police and firefighters, served mainly to lustrate the applicants and the most frequent word heard there was “claim”. They separated newly-arriving refugees from those who had left the detention centers and who therefore, from the police perspective, could not “claim” more aid.
At the beginning of their work at the railway station, the “front desk” staffers did their best to advocate for the volunteers to provide food or lodging only to those who “had a claim”. After a significant part of the refugees gradually moved into the outdoor tent camp in Troja, and above all after they moved into the outdoor tent camp in Malešice, run by the Prague Center for Social Services and conceived of as a place for those “without claim”, we registered repeated cases of representatives of the “front desk” repeating to Romani refugees that they would not receive any aid in the Czech Republic and that they should leave. We know of specific families who were already receiving temporary protection in the Czech Republic but who went abroad at the urging of the “front desk”. (One such family happens to be featured in the Interior Ministry’s promotional materials.)
The Aliens Police and the firefighters began to “accompany” Romani refugees to the trains heading to Hungary or Slovakia to make sure they actually got on board. We registered a case where one family who had been “accompanied” to a train by men in uniform then repeatedly pulled the emergency brake.
So much for what we believe it’s necessary to remember.
The second aim we set for ourselves was to call for such events to never recur. How can we achieve this? As is usual in cases of discrimination that is systemic, it’s impossible to point the finger at just one culprit. Change will have to come from more than one direction.
We are calling on the media to cover the situations of people who fell through the cracks in the system. They should learn from the case of their disseminating dangerous disinformation about the allegedly dual citizenships of Romani refugees, they should insist on verifying politicians’ allegations, and in cases associated with racial discrimination they should proceed bravely, ethically, and with sensitivity.
We call on politicians, at regional and state level, not to be afraid to stand up for the values of basic dignity and human rights, irrespective of what opinion polls say before elections. Countless expert publications from sources that are more professional than we are assert unequivocally that caring for the vulnerable pays off.
We thank all the staffers with the nonprofits, the state-supported organizations, and the state and administrative bodies which are doing their best to combat discrimination that is systemic. Believe us, we know how exhausting and isolating a job that can sometimes be. We wish them a lot of strength, mutual support, and the best possible conditions for their work.
To all members of the general public who are not indifferent to the fate not just of the Romani refugees, but of all who fall through the cracks in the system, our message is that you should be loud and persistent, you should make your position known. If you would like to join us and deliver aid directly in the field, our doors are always open, of course (never be afraid to ask anybody in a reflective vest how to sign up). There are many ways to assist. You’ll find yours.
Thanks to everybody who made it here. I hope we’ll meet again under happier circumstances!
