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Campaign Against Slovak Visas

Labour Councillor Brian Smedley, Administrator, Bridgwater Czech-Slovak Friendship Society writes...

On October 8th Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw imposed visa requirements on Slovakia - a country that is a key candidate for European Union membership, and which, only days before, had ditched its autocratic ruler, Meciar, in favour of a democratic coalition.

For the past 12 months, Slovak and Czech gypsies ("Roma") have been seeking asylum in the UK, claiming persecution - only to find reception committees formed by the National Front at Dover dockside, and a government which granted only 20 out of 695 applications.

Racially Motivated Attacks

Since the Velvet Revolution of 1989, when former Czechoslovakia moved from communism back into the capitalist world, under the auspices of respected liberal and former dissident Vaclav Havel, 28 gypsies have been murdered in racially motivated attacks, often by gangs of neo-nazi skinheads.

It comes as a shock to learn that in the new capitalist Czech lands, with a boom economy of 5% unemployment, 1997 statistics show gypsy unemployment at 70-90%. The overwhelming number of Czechs and Slovaks will tell you "...lazy gypsies don't want to work; they're happy living off benefits and stealing". Earlier this year in Javornice, eastern Slovakia, a gypsy ghetto with 100% unemployment was destroyed by flood and 49 people died. Popular Slovak comment was "God's judgement because of their stealing" and "...it was pay-day, they wouldn't have noticed because they were all drunk".

In Bridgwater we know very well Czech and Slovak attitudes to their gypsy minority - not a pretty aspect of our Friendship Society. Formed after the Velvet Revolution, with the aim of bringing together people previously at cold war, we now organise up to 1000 people travelling between the 3 countries each year - Czechoslovakia split into 2 in 1993. One of the main things we can offer Czech and Slovak people is an opportunity to spend time in a multicultural, multiethnic society, where racist views can be challenged, even opinions on the all-embracing benevolence of capitalism, and, since 1997, the benefits of living in a social democracy.

So, thanks a bunch Jack Straw for bringing in the visas - how do we explain that one? Now the Slovak view is "...bloody gypsies, now we have to pay to go to England because of them!" A visa charge of £40 is the equivalent of a week's wages to the average Slovak.

We have no option but to challenge the decision. At the beginning of the crisis in 1997 we had written to the Czech Embassy expressing concern at the level of racial oppression in the Czech Republic and had raised the issue with Home Officer Minister Mike O'Brien and leader of European Socialist Group Pauline Green, expecting a positive and progressive stance from the Labour Party.

Then it was easier to explain. In September 1997 Czech and Slovak gypsies arrived first in Canada and then in Dover following a programme by tabloid Czech TV station "TV Nova", called "Gypsies Go To Heaven", which encouraged gypsies to go to the UK or Canada to claim asylum and receive full benefits. At least one Czech Council backed this up with offers to pay their airfare. On arrival, the reality was proved to be the opposite, with Government Ministers pandering to tabloid calls to "deal with the scroungers" as "economic migrants". Here we surely have a problem - up to 40,000 US citizens and a large number of Brits now live in Prague alone as "economic migrants", taking advantage of the low price economy. Isn't the new Europe all about free movement of capital and labour?

Gypsy persecution is nothing new around Europe. In Romania they were enslaved for 3 centuries and bought and sold as chattels. Whilst most gypsies are based in East Europe in fixed settlements, many continued to pursue a nomadic life. The big change came with the 2nd World war, when half a million gypsies were killed in Nazi gas chambers, and the subsequent coming to power of the Communists across the eastern states of Europe.

In Czechoslovakia the Communists tried to meet their labour shortage by moving gypsies settled in Slovakia to the depopulated Czech borderlands - the Sudetenland, from where they'd expelled the German population. This regular source of work was taken up eagerly by the Roma community, and by the 1970s they reached near full employment, although there were documented cases of breaches of human rights, with forced assimilation, restriction of free movement and covert sterilisation.

In 1989 the collapse of communism brought the realities of capitalist market forces to bear on the previously protected Czechoslovak economy, in an atmosphere of pandemic unemployment. Roma were often the first to go, forcing many into the black economy or crime. Across East Europe, prostitution, Chicago style gang warfare and drug racketeering are rife. This has combined evilly with the post-communist search for a National-ist identity and the attitude amongst many that "...anything the communists said was good must be bad". The consequence has been the rise of neo-nazi groups, with links across Europe to other far-right groups, and a parliamentary presence by the far-right Republican Party of Sladek who makes no secret of his anti-gypsy views. More disturbing is that an increasing number of Czechs and Slovaks see gypsies as "parasites" and "responsible for rising crime rates" and that they should live separated from the rest of society. The Mayor of Usti Nad Labem recently advocated the building of a wall round the gypsy part of town. It is common to find Roma barred from pubs, discos and other public areas.

In 1994 the Czech government used the division of Czechoslovakia as an opportunity to exclude as many Roma as possible from citizenship, on the pretext that most were of Slovak origin due to their post-war migration under the communists, and the fact that most Czech romanies had been killed in the holocaust. In Slovakia, Prime Minister Meciar described Roma as "anti-social, mentally backward, unassimilable and socially unacceptable". The Czech Republic, under the Thatcherite guidance of Premier Klaus, and Slovakia under the increasingly demagogic Meciar both sought to join the EU. The Slovaks were put on the slow train by the West, due to concerns about human rights and economic liberalisation. Both have now been rejected by their own people: Klaus last year in favour of the Social Democrats of Milos Zeman, and Meciar in October 1998 by a hardworking democratic coalition ranging from Christian democrats to the Left block. One of the first acts of the new Slovak government was to issue a proclamation condemning racial intolerance and seeking to redress it - the first act by the British government was to impose visas!

Today, 80% of Roma children are consigned to special schools for the mentally subnormal, although they are lively, imaginative and of normal intelligence. It is little wonder that Czech and Slovak gypsies grasp at any "Straw" to find a life without persecution. It seems the new Labour government is saying "they've grasped the wrong one here"!