Kamila Plachetková: We Roma know where hate leads, so why are some of us now spreading hatred of Ukrainians and supporting extremists?
Recently I have been following with great uneasiness how the hate in the Czech Republic that targeted Romani people first and foremost for many long years is being turned upon Ukrainians. However, what shocks me the most is the fact that some Roma are participating in this hatred.
How is it possible that people who have an historical experience of discrimination, persecution and racism are currently disseminating similar ideas against another minority? I recall my own personal experiences in this regard.
I am a Romani woman from the Czech Republic and I have been living in England for 13 years now. During all that time, I have never encountered hatred here, not from local English people, and not from Romani people.
In England there are also more than 217,000 Ukrainians today. Why is it so different for us all here than it is in the Czech Republic?
Is this a question of education, of manipulation by the media, or is it maybe a deeply-rooted frustration? What surprises me even more is the fact that some Romani people in the Czech Republic are openly supporting extremist parties and ideologies, even when those ideologies or parties make no secret of their hatred towards the Roma themselves.
I have even seen cases of Romani people voting for parties whose representatives would most prefer to see the Roma somewhere on the outskirts of society – if at all. This is like watching as a victim begins to sympathize with their aggressor.
The Roma should realize that they are spreading the ideas of the dangerous ideologies which led to the murders of their forebears in the concentration camps. The collective guilt that is now being applied to the Ukrainians is the same as the collective guilt that led to the persecution and murder of Romani people during the Second World War.
After all, we Roma know what it is like to be tarred with the same brush just because of our nationality. I recall my 12th birthday in the Czech Republic, for instance.
At a public transportation stop full of people, a group of adult neo-Nazis spotted me and beat me up. My white girlfriend standing next to me was untouched.
Everybody standing there ignored the violence. Nobody intervened, because they believed I probably deserved it.
For them, I was just a “dirty gypsy girl”. The exact same prejudice that those people felt toward me back then is what I now see in the reactions of some Romani people toward Ukrainians.
This is incomprehensible to me, and I feel great shame over it. If we Roma start spreading hate toward others, we stop having any moral right to complain if that same hatred is turned against us.
It is time for Romani people to realize this and to stand up against these dangerous ideas before it will be too late.
Kamila Plachetková lives in Manchester, England, where she works as a freelance IT specialist and web designer. In 2018 she established one of the biggest antifascist e-shops, FCK NZS, and last year she added a Czech-language version of it. She previously worked in online marketing.
