the lede
14 THE CARAVAN
Shifting Impressions
What the preservation of a
Roma identity entails / Communities/ alexander hurst
Miroslav Brož, holding a can of
Krušovice beer, greeted me and Eli
Naegele, a Czech reporter, one April
afternoon last year. We had just arrived
at Předlice, a neighbourhood 15 minutes
by bus from the desolate centre of Ústí
nad Labem, a visibly poor industrial
town near the Czech-German border.
Gesturing at the graffiti, grime and
abandoned buildings that bordered
the open field in front of us, Brož,
the 38-year-old president of Konexe,
a Prague-based Roma-rights NGO,
described Předlice and its dilapidated
housing as “the worst Roma ghetto in
t he cou nt r y.”
The conditions under which the
Roma or Romani—a traditionally itiner-
ant group, comprising between 10 and
12 million people in Europe—live in
the Czech Republic are particularly
dire. According to a survey conducted
in 2015 by the European Commission,
respondents in the Czech Republic re-
ported the most negative views towards
the Roma out of all respondents in
countries of the European Union. The
Czech Roma—48 percent of whom live
below the poverty line—are three times
more likely than the general population
to have gone no further than primary
school, and face unemployment rates as
high as 90 percent in some communi-
ties.
The Roma experience hostility across
the European continent. A 2016 survey
conducted by the Pew Research Center,
an American think tank, found that 48
percent of respondents, largely from
western European countries, had an
“unfavourable” view of the Roma. This
included respondents in Italy, France
and Germany. France began deporta-
tions of Roma in 2009, under the then
president Nicolas Sarkozy. Despite
the European Parliament’s objections,
expulsions continued during the re-
maining three years of Sarkozy’s term,
and intensified under his successor,
François Hollande, with more than
56,000 Romani deported between 2012
and 2017.
Studies suggest that roughly 1,
years ago, the Roma left the mountains
of northern India and began to settle
on the steppes of the Caucuses, before
starting to arrive in Eastern Europe in
the 1100s. From there, Roma groups
took disparate paths, but there have
been attempts at organising them
under a cohesive identity in the past
two centuries. In 1933, for instance, the
first Congress of the “United Gypsies
of Europe” adopted green and blue
horizontal bars as the Roma flag; in
1971, a 16-spoked chakra was overlaidon that design; in 2016, the Indian
minister of external affairs declared
that the Roma were “children of India.”
Although some Roma groups are enthu-
siastic about creating a shared identity,
discourse on the Roma has pointed out
the difficulty in a non-territorial, tradi-
tionally itinerant group seeing itself as
unified.
On the evening of 30 April 2017, Brož
joined dozens of Roma families in a
field at the eastern corner of the Roma
neighbourhood. It was Carodejnice,
Walpurgis Night, or “the Night of
Witches,” when vast crowds across the
Czech Republic gather around fires and
consume sausages and beer in a night-
long celebration. Children chased each
other around a scarecrow witch on the
field, while a few women roasted pork
sausages over an open fire and clusters
of men stood around drinking beer. In
the middle of the clearing, a Catholic
priest prepared for a mass that wouldLETTER FROM
THE CZECH
REPUBLICIn 1939, weeks before the Nazi invaded Czechoslovakia , the country’s government built a
labour camp in the quiet southern Bohemian village of Lety u Písku.sovfoto / uig / getty images