Why did the Roma Spirit awards stop in the Czech Republic?

While in Slovakia the annual Roma Spirit awards are being held this year for the 15th time, in the Czech Republic we held just six years of this ceremony before it ended in 2017 due to lack of support from sponsors and from public broadcaster Czech Television, and with it ended a unique opportunity to show the Czech and the Romani public a positive, up-to-date image of the lives of Romani people, their cultural trends, and the non-Romani and Romani individuals and organizations involved with including members of the Romani minority in society. During the final four years of this award ceremony in the Czech Republic, I directed the television taping of the program alongside Michael Kocáb, who prepared the program for the evening, and I also directed video profiles of the nominees for screening during the ceremonies themselves.

I was entrusted with that direction thanks to my many years of experience from working on Czech Television programs about Romani-related subject matter. The Michael Kocáb Foundation and co-organizer Open Society (Otevřená společnost) bought the license for this award event from the Slovak partners in the days when it was called “Gypsy Spirit” (in English).

The fact that the name was in English was meant to give the event a European dimension and to attract attention abroad. The choice of that name, however, was an example of the insensitivity of the majority-society perspective on the Czech and the Slovak Roma who do not identify with the “Gypsy” term because they already have their own name for themselves, and while I am not a Romani man myself, I lived in emigration for many years, and that experience taught me how to empathize with those who are not treated equally in our state.

From 2009-2010, Kocáb was also an active Human Rights Minister in the Czech Government. While he did not manage in that brief time to shut down the industrial pig farm at Lety which overlapped the site of the WWII-era concentration camp for Roma there, and while he did not manage to resolve the lingering problems of Romani social exclusion, he did push for something unprecedented in a Czech society accustomed to awards ceremonies as gala evenings: A celebratory evening about Romani people and with Romani people.

The galas were held in the center for international spirituality called the Prague Crossroads (Pražské křižovatky) in the Church of Saint Anne, which was reconstructed by Dagmar and Václav Havel’s VIZE 97 Foundation. At the first such ceremony in 2009, Havel, Archbishop Miloslav Vlk, and other eminent guests made appearances to greet those involved.

Kocáb was the most appropriate person to spearhead a cultural event of this kind. Not only did he know the Czech and Slovak music scenes like nobody else, but he was very close to Romani people and to their music, which was an integral part of the awards ceremony, and he knew many musicians personally.

I personally experienced Kocáb jumping onstage to play music with Radek Banga and Vojta Lavička during rehearsal. He created the composition of each ceremony and directed the evening himself.

Thanks to his fame, Kocáb managed to attract important sponsors from abroad, ambassadors, and the auspices of the Czech political scene. After the first two years, however, there was a two-year hiatus.

The next ceremony did not happen until 2013. As of 2014 the evening was called “Roma Spirit”.

The final four galas in the Czech Republic, held regularly to mark International Human Rights Day (10 December), involved eminent figures bestowing the awards onstage, such as the Ambassador of the United States of America Norman L. Eisen and his successor, Andrew H. Schapiro, Ambassador of the Republic of France Jean-Pierre Asvazadourian, Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany, Arndt Freiherr Freytag von Loringhoven, the Ambassador of Israel, Eran Yuvan, and ambassadors from other countries. In 2016 Pope Francis sent a greeting to the ceremony.

Greetings were sent by video from George Soros, from EU representatives, and from other eminent figures of world stature. Czech Television broadcast the taped version of the ceremony after the Christmas holidays in an afternoon time slot.

Awards were given to the very most eminent figures in Romani life, starting with Karel Holomek, and continuing with many Romani artists and writers, including Emil Cina, Andrej Giňa, Ladislav Goral, as well as the Romani Studies scholars Milena Hübschmannová (in memoriam), Eva Davidová and Ctibor Nečas (in memoriam). Fate then turned against the program.

In October 2016, a young Romani man died in the town of Žatec. First he was physically assaulted by the non-Romani staff and some non-Romani diners in a restaurant where he allegedly behaved incorrectly and bothered local non-Romani women.

His death, and the behavior of the police during their investigation of it, affected the Romani community greatly. A boycott by Romani people of the Roma Spirit awards was then called for because they were being organized by non-Romani people.

The ceremony was still held that year, and Holomek gave a speech explaining the calls for a boycott as a misunderstanding resulting from multigenerational Romani trauma, but it was the last year a Roma Spirit evening has been organized in the Czech Republic to date. After 2016, two important sponsors refused to continue to contribute to Kocáb’s endeavor, the years of support from the Ambassador of the USA were cancelled after Trump took office in the USA in January 2017, and the organizers’ decision to close Roma Spirit was also influenced by criticism from Romani people and by several of the 2016 awardees’ refusal to be honored in response to the scandal in Žatec.

Kocáb said at the time that he hoped Roma Spirit would resume, probably in a different form so more Romani people would accept it more broadly. However, without sponsors, it was not easy to finance the entire endeavor.

This was not just about the cost of one gala evening, but the cost of several months of preparations, choosing nominees, paying for the license and paying Czech Television. The public broadcaster probably could never have undertaken such an enterprise from its own resources.

Recently, in comparison with the 1990s and the 2000s, Czech Television has not been welcoming to Romani programming. Romani-related subject matter is all but invisible in the broadcast lineup.

This violates Czech Television’s own code of conduct, which establishes the principles of delivering broadcasting as a public service. Roma Spirit was an opportunity to creatively, meaningfully include Romani people in the public square.

With the passage of time it has become apparent that this was not just about appreciating certain deeds or figures, or about popularizing Romani culture: The Czech Television broadcasts of those evenings as they were recorded are of a significant scope, a valuable archival document of their day. That, too, is what a public media outlet should focus on: It is the biggest audiovisual database of the nation, documenting the times we live in and showing to everybody who the people we share this state with are.

First published in Czech in Romano voďi magazine.