Radoslav Puky lies in the farthest corner of Trebisov’s town cemetery, his name scrawled across the rough wooden cross in black marker, which the wind and sun will soon erase.
”We are even buried separately,” a friend says acidly. ”Everyone hates the Roma.”
To his neighbours, the slim, dark-haired young man was a quiet but friendly companion, whose overwhelming love for his baby son was ”like an addiction”.
To most Slovaks, Radoslav was just another Gypsy; a 28-year-old unemployed Rom from the squalid slums of eastern Slovakia.
To many western Europeans, he was a threat: one of the millions of Roma in accession states who could, in the Daily Express‘s warning, ”flood” Britain and ”leech” on us when the EU expands on Saturday.
The Roma have every reason to leave Slovakia, where the 400 000-strong community makes up 7,5% of the population, but is treated as a despised underclass. There is de facto — and increasing — segregation in schools and housing, as well as cemeteries.
There are towns that have banned Roma from entering, never mind living there. To many Slovaks, including officials and police, they are ”filthy”; to some even ”thieves” and ”vermin” fit only to be ”sent to the gas chambers”.
One glance at the conditions in Trebisov’s Roma ghetto shows why Romany infant mortality rates are three times the average. A shantytown sprawls around crumbling apartment blocks, shacks thrown together from corrugated iron, board, bits of wood, scraps of plastic and carpet. Inhabitants share latrines and fetch water from standpipes. Toddlers play amid broken glass along the rutted mud track, while a tiny girl in too-short trousers pokes at a smouldering fire on one of the rubbish heaps eating up the settlement.
Everywhere there are people, people, people, standing in the street or leaning out through glassless windows, talking and trying to pass the time. They have nothing else to do; few can remember when they last had a job.
Yet they are too scared to speak of Radoslav Puky, whose death exemplifies the effect of accession on Roma. So far, it has done almost nothing to help, and everything to harm.
In January the government slashed state benefits by half in a desperate attempt to make its struggling economy competitive with other EU members. It left many Roma with a choice: pay rent or buy food. Or, to put it another way, choose homelessness or hunger.
The following month men from the settlement walked into nearby stores and took groceries to feed their starving families. Radoslav was not one of them, but the police response was indiscriminate.
According to Amnesty International, 250 officers stormed the settlement, beating men, women and children with truncheons and electric cattleprods. Radoslav was last seen fleeing police; relatives later pulled his body from a lake.
Police say he drowned accidentally and had no external injuries. Friends — too frightened to be named — say he had a broken ribcage.
Joining the EU was supposed to help the Roma. Candidate states were meant to prove they had tackled human rights abuses and improved social conditions.
Instead, according to Beata Olahova, the Slovakian monitor for the European Roma Rights Centre: ”Accession has drastically changed life for the worse for Roma. The government [now] has a good strategy. But they don’t know about it at local levels and it’s not implemented.”
The problem is not just poverty, though eastern Slovakia will be one of the 10 poorest regions in the union. The EU has offered â,¬10-million to develop settlements, but at least one village refused improvements in case they encouraged other Roma to move to the area.
Although the Roma originated in India, they have been largely sedentary since arriving in central Europe in the late 13th century. Yet white Europeans, and particularly the Slovaks, have never learned to love their neighbours.
According to an European Roma Rights Centre report: ”The history of the Roma and the state [in] what is now Slovakia is a continuous shift between policies which are openly hostile up to murderous towards the Roma, and policies disguised as assistance which actually degrade.”
They include centuries of slavery, extermination in Adolf Hitler’s gas chambers, and the introduction of forced sterilisation (which persists) under communism.
Yet in Trebisov even the elders — and they are few, since Romany life expectancy is 15 years shorter than average — say life has never been quite this hard.
The velvet revolution in 1989 brought a terrifying resurgence of suppressed prejudice as well as mass unemployment, which has now reached between 15% and 20% nationwide. For the Roma it is 80% and in settlements like Trebisov, ”99% and a 100%”, says one resident wryly. There are more settlements like Trebisov than ever: the numbers have soared from 250 to 600.
Not all Roma live in these conditions. Most are integrated into mainstream society, and despite his dark skin, Radoslav used to be one of them. But the settlements are often just a redundancy, rent hike or racist landlord away. When debts mounted last year, Radoslav’s family were evicted from their flat in town and forced to move to the slums.
Radoslav and the baby son on whom he doted had little future here. Yet friends say that, like most residents, he had no plans to leave Slovakia. His highest hope was leaving the settlement.
”It’s impossible to live here,” says Koloman Pulko, not bitterly but sadly. He is the same age as Radoslav but looks 40, ground down by poverty and despair. His wife and five children share a tiny damp room and a lean-to shack of the same proportions.
His three-month-old daughter has severe bronchitis; his teenage son, who has learning difficulties, was beaten severely in the police raids. Their benefits have been slashed. Yet he laughs at the idea of going abroad.
”If it were possible to go somewhere else I would leave, but I have no money to go. How could I get there?”
Anyway, he adds, everybody hates the Roma.
Britain is relatively welcoming. In February, Home Secretary David Blunkett announced that migrants from accession countries could work legally in Britain if they registered with the authorities.
But the government has already warned that it will follow the lead of the other big states — which have imposed work restrictions as far ahead as 2011 — if numbers exceed the official forecasts of about 12 000 a year. It has also banned migrants from claiming benefits for up to two years, extendable to seven years if they believe the system is being abused.
”We don’t want benefits; we are not afraid of work,” says 46-year-old Stefan Lacko angrily, fingering the red scars left on his cheek by a skinhead attack a few years ago.
”I paid taxes for 30 years before I lost my job. We are builders, drivers; we sweep the roads. But these countries have opened the borders for doctors and lawyers and not for Roma. That’s not democracy.”
Romany dreams of a better life, at home or abroad, have dwindled. They know they are not ”desirable” migrants; they lack the languages and skills, even if they could scrape together enough Slovakian crowns to make their way out of the country. The appalling quality of education for Roma, and years of unemployment, have made many unemployable even at home.
”People have stopped talking about going: now they talk about not being able to go,” observes Ludmilla Horvathova.
”I know a few people who went abroad [to work illegally], but most of them didn’t find jobs and came back.”
Her younger sister was an exception — she has married and settled in Belgium — yet the 28-year-old pulls a face at the prospect of following her.
”I went to visit her, stayed two days and wanted to come home,” she says. ”It’s nice to go for a holiday but nothing attracts me and my family’s here.”
Despite their lack of status, many Roma see Slovakia as their home. Alexander Musinka, an anthropologist at the University of Presov, says Britain is too expensive to reach and too far from their families to attract many migrants.
Some of the integrated and better educated Roma may try to move to the Czech Republic or other accession countries, where they face marginally less discrimination, but he would be surprised to see ”even 1 000 Roma moving” when the borders open.
Those migrants may not get a warm welcome, however.
”Other countries claim to be democratic and criticise Slovakia,” says Beata Olahova. ”But they have the same prejudices themselves. Look at Britain. Even you are afraid to open your doors.” — Guardian Unlimited Â