Commentary: My father would not have tolerated what the Duchcov attacker did

So many people, and not just recently, have been cursing us Roma (or Gypsies, whichever you prefer). I’m not going to write about the recent murder of a Romani man in Teplice, because the police are refusing to say anything about that case. What bothers me today is the brutal assault by a Romani boy on a married couple in Duchcov and the opinions expressed online about how that incident should be "addressed".

I am reading online that we Gypsies stick together no matter what happens, that we behave with impunity, and other opinions held about us by the majority society. On the one hand I am not surprised that the situation around the coexistence of Czechs and Roma is what it is. There are problems now and there will be problems later, whether they concern crime, education or unemployment. Who is responsible? Is it the majority and the system, or is it our minority, which has not managed to fully integrate during however many years we have spent on this territory? That’s for each of us to answer as we see fit.  

Duchcov

I have watched the video footage of this crime. Now the barely 16-year-old criminal is apologizing, saying he was drunk, he didn’t know what he was doing, and that he, poor boy, has now ruined his own life. I can’t take his words seriously because he is still just a kid, as we say. Rationality here is supposed to rest with the laws, with his parents above all, and with the police. That applies everywhere! However, sometimes the laws in this country seem worse to me than those anywhere else.

How can it happen that a boy this young, who is about to become a father, can just get drunk and brutally assault someone? Why hasn’t he been taken into custody? What sort of feeling is society supposed to have about this? I’ll describe it for you:  Society now has the feeling that this is about "advantages" or "positive racism". That’s bad.

This incident bothers me. I don’t know how other Romani people view it, but this kid and those like him are making our bad reputation even worse. People always look at us – all of us – with horror after such a crime. The opinions of the majority society should be important to us, because we live here.

Czech versus Gypsy

Whenever we are among our own kind, we each curse one another in rather similar ways. From one side or another we always hear the following:  "If a Czech had done that they would lock him up…. If a Gypsy did that it would be bad." Each side perpetually claims that the other gets away with everything. Have you ever noticed this? Does a solution to it exist? 

Yes:  Quality education of our children, employment, and mainly, closing down the ghettos – but this will not happen on its own! The first impulse towards all of this should definitely come from us, the Roma. It’s not too late, we must not throw in the towel! There do exist people, after all, who are in charge of exactly these issues and who are even paid to be. Unfortunately, I have not yet noticed any positive news about their work. 

We don’t see news reports about a Gypsy doing something good, or about how Romani children are completing their educations – just simply how the situation is improving, however slowly. If the media is not interested in this, then something is wrong here. 

I hope nothing like Duchcov will ever happen again. Dear Romani people, think, please, about the fact that we all share the same skin color, we all live in the same country where they don’t exactly love us – and that it’s not too late.

How we raise our children is the most important thing! If I had ever done anything similar to what that boy did in Duchcov, I wouldn’t have been able to mouth an apology afterwards. My father would have punished me severely for it. There are many such fathers, but apparently not enough of them.