Czech Republic

It is the first day of school. The children are well-scrubbed and neatly dressed. Some, the littlest and most excited, have their mothers in tow as they wait at the bus stop.

The bus pulls in. The doors fold open. The driver glares.

And forbids them from boarding.

"I don't take gypsies."

Moms, incensed, start to yell. Kids, confused and frightened, begin to cry. The driver, unmoved, slams shut the door and the bus rumbles off, leaving youngsters stricken and adults seared with shame.

Many of these children have just had their introductory lesson in what it means to be Roma – reviled and excluded – in this so-civilized country.

Ask the question: Why did 2,869 Czech Roma [arrive] at Toronto's Pearson airport between Oct. 2007 and June 2009, seeking asylum as alleged political refugees?

Here is an answer: Rust-belt Kladno – birthplace of NHL star Jaromir Jagr – a mining eyesore 25 kilometres northwest of cosmopolitan Prague, where gypsy children are unwelcome in public schools and on buses, where families live upwards of 10 to a single room in a dilapidated tenement building on the hardscrabble edge of town.

Kudrik, his mother Božena Bandurová, daughter Pavlína

Anna Siváková burst into tears when she saw the cramped, two-room shelter that the town of Vítkov assigned to her family.

The Roma family had just lost its home in an apparently racially motivated arson attack April 19. Siváková and her husband, Pavel Kudrik, suffered severe burns that kept them hospitalized in nearby Ostrava for nearly two weeks, while their youngest daughter, 2-year-old Natálka, remained in intensive care, struggling to survive.

To Siváková, it felt like yet another blow to return to Vítkov after her May 2 hospital release, only to join her husband, three older children, and parents in the crowded, shabby shelter, located behind a veterinary clinic and next to a dog kennel. With its metal-frame bunk beds and no space to move around - let alone allow the children to play or spread out their homework - the place felt, as one family member said, "like a prison."

Czech television has stopped broadcasting anti-Roma political advertising by the far-right National Party, ahead of the European elections. The video promoted, quote-unquote: “a final solution to the Gypsy question”.

Roma have suffered from rising extremist violence recently in the Czech Republic. Prime Minister Jan Fischer said he believed the advert constituted criminal incitement to racial hatred.

The government’s Media Commission chairman Vitezslav Jandak said: “If somebody offers a ‘final solution’, it reminds me of something. I think higher law should apply here: moral law. I am very glad that Czech TV has pulled these spots.”

The term ‘final solution’ is strongly associated with extermination policy in WWII, against minorities disenfranchised by Hitler — mostly Jews but also Roma.

The previous Czech government sought unsuccessfully to crack down on extremism after a wave of neo-Nazi marches and attacks on Roma. The ‘final solution’ outrage has brought renewed calls, to include banning the National Party and the similarly-oriented Workers Party.

Roma still discriminated

The Roma situation in EU countries is a problem that is still waiting to be solved. European institutions are moving slowly, despite the fact that at all levels clear positions were expressed. Meanwhile, according to an European poll recently published, half of the Roma declare themselves discrimination victims regarding the employment, housing and education, and a quarter of them says that they were victims of aggression, threats or harassment during the last 12 months.

According to the Eu-Midis poll of the EU, Romania discriminates Roma least from all European countries. The highest Roma discrimination is in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Greece, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. These are the countries where the poll was made, but they are representative countries because here live most of the Roma. One from two interviewed Roma, felt discriminated in the past 12 months.

Romanians discriminate: in the private services sector, when employing or even at work, in the social assistance services and in schools.

Elena Gorolova at the UN

Elena Gorolová and her husband had always dreamed of having a little girl. Blessed with the birth of two sons, they looked forward to the next – until she was told she had been sterilized without her knowledge by the very doctor who delivered her son.

The horrifying discovery led to the slow realization that she was not alone, and that many Roma women like herself had been involuntarily sterilized in hospitals in the Czech Republic. Pleas to officials not only fell on deaf ears, but added insult to injury.

"My husband and I visited the social services department to demand an explanation and asked if this had happened because we are Romani and the staff were extremely rude to us and threw us out" Gorolová told a gathering at the United Nations in Geneva, on the sidelines of the Durban Review Conference.