Edita Stejskalová: The moral claim to full integration, or, amazing injustice

Integration loses its purpose without sharing in political power

In his public speeches, Martin Luther King Jr. constantly reiterated the right of African-Americans to integration. Under no circumstances, however, did he mean maintaining the order that had been in existence up until then, including the ideas white people had about integration. He spoke convincingly, loudly and proudly about integration from the Black perspective. I am of the opinion, and I am not alone, that without sharing in political power, integration loses its purpose.

King spoke of integration as a more equal share of political power because only that would lead to the fair distribution of prosperity. A democratic, just society does not deny access, it does not install barriers, and it does not endlessly discuss the right to equal access to education, employment, housing, public services, power and justice. It makes its decisions in accordance with that right and takes action. It works in accordance with that right and it changes over time.

Our aim is not fear or insults. Our aim has to be a deep transformation throughout society that will be beneficial to all.

We Roma have been bringing up our demand for full integration too cautiously. In the tone of our voices one can hear a certain humility, a lack of belief in our own potential and in our own people. Sadly, we are doing this in the presence of politicians, or in public. We speak so as not to distress or insult the majority society. This weakens us. It exhausts us. It demotivates us. Our aim is not fear and insults. Our aim is a deep transformation throughout society that will be beneficial to all.

Can we speak about opportunities?

We Roma frequently allow ourselves to be lulled into complacency, drunk on the very shaky arguments made by the authorities and the public that we are already being treated decently and fairly. I will give just a few examples of these arguments: At the highest level of the public administration there are literally three Romani people working in management positions. The proportion of college-educated Romani men and women is growing. Not every Romani man is unemployed. Not all Roma live in apartments or houses that probably don’t even rate any kind of category because they are unfit for human habitation. Not every Romani person is poor. There are even political parties giving the opportunity to Romani people to run for office. Even the “Freedom and Direct Democracy” (SPD) movement, which is racist, gives Romani people this kind of opportunity. Can we, therefore, speak about these opportunities?

The main proof of the equality of the Roma is based by politicians here on the fact that they are willing to come down to our level and to empathetically correct us. They pretend this is about having a discussion. We respond with gratitude and politeness, because we might easily lose such an OPPORTUNITY and make the unenviable situation of Romani men, women and families worse. By doing so, we are getting drunk on our own ideas in order to compensate for the fear and trauma we experience from the everyday, omnipresent arrogance and feelings of superiority we encounter, attitudes which are able to close that slightly-open door to us at any time. We are too afraid those feelings of superiority will brand us Roma as those with whom it is impossible to RATIONALLY REACH AN AGREEMENT.

If we Roma are to demand and discuss full integration, then it cannot be anything other than our share of political power and responsibility. We have to reject the gradual opportunities which pretend to head in the direction of full integration. We must reject them because they are not good for the essence of our humanity. We have a wealth of experience that shows such OPPORTUNITIES do not transform society.

Is the Romani situation the result of our equality before the law?

The examples I have given here are the ones the authorities and the public rely on to convince us Roma that all is as it should be. Above all, they have reprimanded us by saying the system is already correctly, fairly functioning. According to Interior Minister Vít Rakušan, the system works in that the laws apply to everybody equally. Can he convince us Roma of that? He said that just “bastards” break the law, which is itself color-blind! That is what he did his best to convince Romani people of during the recent discussion on ROMEA TV. There was nobody in that room to respond to him. Not as an expert, but as a Romani person to a Czech person, to tell him that his comprehension of our “ordinary anger and fear” is not enough. We want discrimination to be strictly countered and we want forceful execution of the law, especially if the justice system and the state administration are the ones committing discrimination.

Since I love data and facts, I will present some now. The importance and the weight of the information below is enhanced by understanding who published it. This information comes from two basic sources. The first is the Office of the Government of the Czech Republic, which is the author of the “Report on the Situation of the Romani Minority in the Czech Republic for 2021” (Zpráva o situaci romské menšiny v České republice za rok 2021). Here it is important to state that the Report was adopted on 8 March 2023 by the Government of the Czech Republic. The second crucial source is a report entitled “Roma in 10 European Countries – Main Results.” That report was published by the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency in October 2022.

I quote from the “Report on the Situation of the Romani Minority in the Czech Republic for 2021”: “During 2021 there were 33 hate crimes against Romani people, a growth of 14 such incidents compared to 2020. The In IUSTITIA organization, which has long dedicated itself to monitoring hate crime, recorded in its own reports on bias violence in 2021 a total of 13 attacks targeting Roma.” In its Report, the Office of the Government of the Czech Republic also states, e.g., that the faith of Roma in the legal system and in the police, compared to the general population, is very low. Just 19 % of Romani people trust the police, while among the general population, 75 % do. The faith of the Roma in the police has fallen from 33 % in 2016 to 19 % in 2021. Czech Romani people’s faith in the legal system is below the EU average. Just 22 % of Romani people trust the legal system compared to 54 % of the general population.

Now I will cite from the FRA document: “The Czech Republic has yet to implement the conclusions of the decision by the European Committee of Social Rights in the matter of the European Roma and Travellers Forum (ERTF) against the Czech Republic of 17 May 2016. In that decision, the European Committee of Social Rights concluded that Article 16 of the European Social Charter has been violated because of a lack of essential guarantees being provided when Romani families are evicted, because accessible housing is not arranged for Romani people, and because Romani people are spatially segregated in accommodation conditions that are substandard overall.” On employment: “The crucial factors preventing integration in the labor market are prejudices and discrimination on the basis of ethnic origin. Many Romani people stated that during the last five years they had experienced unequal treatment when seeking work. Between 38 and 75 % of Romani respondents stated that they encountered discrimination when looking for work. The worst situation applies in the Czech Republic, where three out of four Romani people who sought work in the past five years claimed to have encountered discrimination. In that country they also perceived discrimination to happen quite frequently to persons who had worked at least one year during the last five: 41 % of respondents stated they experienced discrimination in the workplace because they are Roma.”

I could list another example from the field of education. The media published an article online on 19 August 2023 entitled “Czech School Inspectorate supports discrimination against Romani pupils in the schools” („Česká školní inspekce podporuje diskriminaci romských žáků ve školách“). The author of the article is Robert Čapek, an author of books for teachers, an instructor and a psychologist. Čapek says the Czech School Inspectorate is not fulfilling its legally ordained responsibility and is therefore contributing to discriminating against Romani children.

We have to ask the Interior Minister and the other members of the Government: Who is the “bastard” in these cases? How did the law work in these cases? Is the Romani situation the result of our equality before the law? 

Mr. President, Mr. Prime Minister, members of the Government and the Parliament of the Czech Republic, constitutional officers, our legal and political system does have a color!

It is essentially possible to say that the integration of minorities is threatened by the shared priorities and values of a society. Those priorities and values stand on the deeply-rooted positions of arrogance and superiority which are under no circumstances “latent” racism. The Interior Minister mentioned them more than once during his recent discussion with a Romani audience on ROMEA TV.

The system has a color. That color is white. Czech society has racism strongly rooted in its structure. It is necessary that Czechs be able to critically view this aspect of their “mentality”. Czechoslovakia’s modern history has not been interpreted as one of clean, pure lawfulness and morality. Czechoslovakia’s history as an independent, modern state, is also a racist history – just as, in the 19th century, it was antisemitic. If the Czechs will be able one day to perceive that perspective and to revise their own attitudes and desires in accordance with it, they will be a benefit to themselves and the next generations. I decidedly would never consider such a capability to be a display of the weakness of their “Czech” patriotism, but on the contrary, of its strength.

I would like to give two examples of how deeply racism permeates our society. I would like to speak about racism as a Czech tradition. It is a tradition that is dysfunctional, exhausted, and has outlived its usefulness, but it is still here with us.

In response to my previous opinion piece, “Minister Jurečka, Minister Rakušan, Senator Němcová, Senator Čunek, stop spitting on the Czech Constitution!” I received a book from an 84-year-old gentleman who is very well-read and very wise. He said to me: “Read this book to understand what we Czechs would have to admit to ourselves.” The book he gave me was by František Komurka, Co řekli naši velikáni o Židech (1942) [What Our Great Figures Said about the Jews]. After reading it, I have come to the unequivocal conclusion that the cultural, political and societal icons of the Czech National Revival, such as Jan Neruda, Petr Bezruč, Otakar Březina, the Mrštík brothers, František Palacký or Karolina Světlá, if they were alive today, would proficiently second absolutely anybody in the hard core of the “National Resistance” today, or any of the purveyors of disinformation, when it comes to their opinions about Jews. You all can judge for yourselves the currency and validity of this principle in relation to Romani people. I’ve chosen Jan Neruda as an example.

Komurka quotes Neruda in his book as writing the following in Národní listy on 17 April 1881 in his “Easter Report on the Jews”:

“I hoped this year there would be something actually festive, e.g., killing a few Jews. That would be nice: On the Jewish holidays they would kill the Christian children, and on our holidays we would kill not just Jewish children, but also adolescents, because Christian love is greater.”  This quote reminded me of the death threats sent to the first-graders in Teplice, Czech Republic in 2017. Their class at the Plynárenská Primary School was attended mostly by Arab, Romani and Vietnamese children.

Komurka also references the book Images from Abroad (Obrazy z ciziny, which is a collection of Neruda’s travelogue feuilletons). In that book, Neruda wrote the following about Jews: “Scattered throughout the world, they have become the plague of mankind, leeches of the worst kind who live nowhere on their own labor, but on the callouses and sweat of others, the blood of laboring mankind must serve to embellish their rich salons.“

Komurka’s book was published when Czechoslovakia no longer existed and when the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia had been installed, and for that reason I will mention here what he wrote in the foreword to it. I quote: “Like almost all Aryan peoples, the Czechs have a strong sense of morality and honor, as well as justice. They subordinate their aspirations to these moral ideals, as is the case with the other most advanced peoples of the Aryan race. Though the weakness of the individual and the severity of the law prevent so many from fulfilling their dream of a balanced life according to the strict moral principles of the just man, yet each one of us aspires to this ideal, which he holds in a corner of his soul and to which he returns again and again at critical moments in his life. However, into this life, guided by Christian ideals, whether we are conscious of it or not, an alien element in the form of the Jews has disturbingly intruded….“

I would just like to very briefly express my view of the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938), which was based on the concept of a single nation under the name of the Czechoslovak nation. I am not attempting to discuss the relations between the Czechs and the Germans or the Hungarians and the Slovaks. The First Republic was the beginning of democracy here, and it is a model that was then aggressively and violently disrupted by Hitler, after which it continued under Stalin (the Soviet Union) until 1989.

I would like to return to racism now to show how strong the discrimination and the undignified treatment of Romani people was during the First Republic. The National Assembly of the Czechoslovak Republic adopted Act No. 117/1927 SB, Z.A N. “On wandering gypsies” on 14 July 1927 (Zákon č. 117/1927 SB. Z. A N. “O POTULNÝCH CIKÁNECH” ZE DNE 14. ČERVENCE 1927).

In Section 5, paragraph 5 that law says: “In the interest of public safety, the direction and type of travel may also be prescribed in the traveller’s certificate, the area in which travelling is permitted may be specified, or other restrictions may be imposed. If this is not the case, the travelling permit shall apply to the whole of the State.“ What else is this than continually-enforced residential segregation, including the segregation of Romani children in education?

“Travelling gypsies shall not be allowed to wander around or to camp in groups larger than a family.” (Section 5 para. 1.). Doesn’t this regulation remind you all of something? Doesn’t it remind you of the audits of the number of tenants living in rental housing which have been undertaken by some local authorities, or of those audits of children attending school in the place of their registered residence undertaken by child welfare authorities, with mayors accompanying them, as well as municipal police?

It is in this same spirit that the system still functions and works, so that Romani people will continue to live in segregation under the sophisticated, thorough control of the majority society. This sophisticated, thorough control over groups which have been marginalized manifests itself in the application of legal norms and in concepts and projects at all levels of the republic. Integrating Romani people here is just a policy project. Integration of the Roma is not a legal or a moral value in and of itself. It is a project that is always at risk depending on election results, the geopolitical situation, the state budget, and crises in the economy or politics. It is a project that is sometimes paternalistic and sometimes repressive. The basis of this project is unsound.

It is time we started valuing ourselves.

We must emphasize that the intensity of the effort Romani people have to expend on their way to finding their happiness, their natural right to decide on their own destiny, freely, is something the majority society is unable to imagine, not even in their wildest dreams. We have achieved this under conditions which are complex and very unequal. That leads me to say that it is time we Roma started valuing ourselves. Each Romani success is a big story of unbeaten determination and moral bravery. We have white people’s sense of superiority to thank for that, it has made us stronger. Let’s be grateful for that.

We have to emphasize that each collective or individual success of Romani men and women consists solely in their own capabilities, their enormous effort, their work and the support of their loved ones. I consider the collective successes of the Roma to be the European Court of Human Rights judgment D.H. and Others vs. the Czech Republic (2007), the establishment of the Museum of Romani Culture, removing the industrial pig farm from the site of the WWII-era concentration camp for Roma at Lety u Písku, Romani children applying to study in college preparatory secondary schools despite having attended “special school” for their compulsory education, the establishment of the Inter-ministerial Commission on Roma Minority Affairs (1997), active involvement in Civic Forum and the building of democracy in our country. The acknowledgement of Roma as a national minority is a Romani success. The adoption of a law to compensate the victims of illegal sterilizations is a Romani success. All of this is the result of the Czechs and Roma cooperating, of their unity.

Our aim as Roma has to be broad self-help and support for leaders and organizations independent of state support.

King spoke of the programs and projects for impoverished people in the USA as curative, but insufficient. I am not rejecting projects targeting excluded localities for the provision of social services, but it will never be possible to build the integration of the Roma on them successfully. Civil society, in the advocacy and independent activism sense, essentially does not exist in Romani civil society. It cannot exist in the proper sense of the word if it is dependent on state subsidies. It is time to support watchdog organizations. The civic empowerment of Roma is what such organizations should do. Our aim has to be broad self-help and support for leaders and organizations independent of state support. The aim has to be the independence of our leaders and organizations.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was concerned with the question of what government would be like if African-Americans participated in it

Progress and transformation will not happen until politicians and society stop denying their own trauma. Progress and transformation will not happen until the Romani people transform their view of themselves. Progress and transformation will not happen until Romani men and women are sitting in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. Progress and transformation will not happen until one of us becomes a minister or a Prime Minister.  

In his essay “A Testament of Hope”, published posthumously in 1969, King discussed the question of what government would be like if Black people could cast ballots and run for office. He said: “Allow me to state clearly that I do not believe white people have a monopoly on sin and greed. However, I do believe that in the Black community there is a kind of collective experience, a kind of shared poverty, which makes it a bit more difficult for us to exploit others.” He also said: “If American Blacks were in decision-making positions in politics, they could encourage the underprivileged and excluded…”

I hope that this piece will become the subject of constructive, fruitful debate. I would like to ask Romani people, or to call on them, not to respond to the hateful comments they are going to see with regard to the subject itself. Those comments will minimize the position and situation of Romani people in the Czech Republic. Please do not let yourselves be drawn into discussions where your intelligence and your literacy will be questioned. I believe that this piece will spark such reactions from some Czechs and some Roma. Ignore them, please. Show them you empathize, but don’t give them even one piece of yourselves. Show them your dignity.