Zuzana Kumanová: Slovakia has more data about Romani people than ever before. What now?

The state knows the number of apartment units and houses inhabited by Roma and the level of their material amenities; it is possible to find out how many Romani people live at the same address, whether they have access to electricity and running water, and how close the nearest bus or train station, church or school is. All these data are available in the Atlas of Roma Communities, which has been published on several websites.

This year, at a cost of almost EUR 900,000, an access system will be added to the latest online version of the Atlas for the public which will display data on projects implemented in each locality, in addition to the data that is so ethnically sensitive about their residents. The justification for the project was criticized last week by the parliamentary party Freedom and Solidarity (Sloboda a Solidarita – SaS), which argued this is an inefficient use of such funds.

The aim of the EU-funded project is to analyse data from field research and present it in graphic form in order to make information about the Roma as accessible as possible to the general public. The project, which will cost almost EUR 900,000, did not have to be critically evaluated by the Finance Ministry’s Value for Money Unit, which just comments on projects that cost a million euro or more.

The project is financially supported by the Slovak Ministry of Investment, Regional Development and Informatization, led by Veronika Remišová, who has already demonstrated her sensitivity (or lack thereof) to Romani issues in the past. The Office of the Slovak Government Commissioner for Roma Communities, headed by Ján Hero, is the beneficiary and implementer.

It is a pity that the leadership of that office has not opened up a public debate on the point of such a project and the purpose of collecting ethnically sensitive data on Roma in Slovakia. Time will tell whether anything will come of the project, to whose advantage it will be, what benefits Roma will derive from it, or how much they will be stigmatised by it.

The collection of data on the Roma here is nothing new; the census was introduced by Empress Maria Theresa and her son Emperor Joseph II. In the history of the Roma, censuses are an ubiquitous element.

In Czechoslovakia, the “Act on Wandering Gypsies of 1927” introduced the issue of so-called “gypsy identity cards” and permits for living on the road. This approach involved the central registration of Romani people in Prague.

That census then became the basis for the targeted murder of Romani people during the Second World War. The post-war period was no exception in terms of registering “citizens of Gypsy origin”, and its records were relatively accurate.

With the advent of democracy in 1989, Romani people expected to get rid of the “C” next to their name in the employment and population records so their ethnicity would become a free choice, not one imposed to their disadvantage from the outside. In 2004, the first Atlas of Romani Communities was created in Slovakia (under the auspices of Iveta Radičová, later Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic).

Its data collection methodology worked with ascribed identity, i.e., mayors and other local stakeholders identified municipalities as Romani communities and their inhabitants as Roma. (Incidentally, Iveta Radičová still owns the trademark for the Atlas of Roma Communities).

In 2013, another Atlas of Roma Communities was created with a slightly modified methodology. Since in practice it has become the basis for the implementation of state policy, it has become an important tool.

The authors themselves stressed that the Atlas should not be seen as a list of marginalized communities, but should just serve as a starting point for planning. Unfortunately, the 153 municipalities identified on the basis of the Atlas were then able to draw support from EU funds throughout the programming period (2014-2021, but essentially until now).

This approach has been criticised, but nothing has changed in practice. In 2018, new data collection on Romani people took place in the field and became the basis for the 2019 Atlas of Roma Communities.

Again, there were changes in the methodology, and the resulting data was surprising, raising real doubts about the authors’ intentions and the validity of their findings. For example, in this data set, the housing estate of Petržalka came out as the fourth most populous locality where Romani people live, with the number of persons with an ascribed Romani identity at 5,150.

Petržalka is a communist-era housing estate in Bratislava, but it is not a ghetto – there is no building on the estate with mostly Romani inhabitants, the Romani residents there are scattered around the estate. The question of how these families and their individual members were recorded remains unanswered.

What is also unusual is that the background documentation and the publication itself were released by former Slovak Government Commissioner for Romani Communities Ábel Ravasz under his own name at a time when he was no longer an official. While the Atlas can be used to develop public policies, that use also has other ramifications.

Roma in excluded localities are sensitive about their identity and have no interest in emphasising it, while majority society members living in municipalities with a high proportion of marginalized communities are not interested in their addresses ending up on such a list because it causes the value of real estate to fall. Also, since the first Atlas was released in 2004, European perceptions of how to work with identity and European society itself has undergone a shift.

EU institutions take a very sensitive approach to this issue, recognizing that there is a thin line that, if crossed, can abuse and damage human dignity and rights, but in Slovakia this sensitivity does not yet exist. Perhaps the fact that members of the National Assembly are highlighting this data digitization project on Romani communities as not very meaningful and overpriced could open up a debate about whether there is any point to collecting ethnically sensitive data when identity is ascribed by a third party, not through free self-identification.