The Last Exile

According to some.

The Edmonton Journal carries this article on part 2 of the Immigration and Refugee Report released on the plight, (and I do mean plight) of Roma in the Czech Republic.

Incidents of members of the Roma minority in the Czech Republic being firebombed, turned away from restaurants and refused housing by landlords are contained in a fact-finding report released in Ottawa Monday.

The report by the Immigration and Refugee Board also noted that in May, the Czech government was considering a ban on two extremist political parties after the broadcast of a National Party video on Czech television which called for “the final solution” to the Roma “question.”

The report was released two weeks after the Canadian government reimposed a visa requirement on Czech citizens to reduce the flow of Roma –once known as gypsies–claiming refugee status in Canada. It was the second of two reports from the March 23-31 fact-finding mission.

Fact-finders were told Roma “rarely travel by train for fear of being intimidated or attacked and instead prefer to travel by bus.” One contact told of accompanying a group of Roma children on a field trip and being denied entry to four separate restaurants.It recounted two separate arson attacks against Roma homes and noted that one of them, in which a two-year-old girl was critically injured, prompted nationwide anti-extremism rallies by thousands of demonstrators.

Immigration and Refugee Board members consult such fact-finding reports to help them determine the credibility of individual refugee claims of a “well-founded fear of persecution” or a threat to their life in their home country. The board is independent of government and does not make visa policy.

Because we all know how the Conservative Minister of Immigration feels about the persecution of the Roma in the Czech Republic and too bad he never bothers to read the reports his department puts out…who knows why – maybe too many pages? Although, I did find this little gem at Embassy Magazine:

Mr. Kenney has said that the Roma face no state persecution in the Czech Republic—where attacks on their communities by radical groups are said to be on the rise—in spite of the fact that the Immigration and Refugee Board has approved nearly all such claims. In 2008, 94 per cent of Czech Roma claims were accepted, while in the first six months of 2009, 72 of the 90 cases heard were accepted.

The Immigration and Refugee Board did publish a report detailing all kinds of unpleasant facts about state protection for the Roma in the Czech Republic in November 1997.

Karel Holomek, a Romani leader in Brno, believes that police protect Roma poorly. Based on his own personal experience Holomek stated that there is a high level of prejudice within the Czech police and he points to the Pisek case[6]6 as an example of the problems found within the Czech police and judiciary (24 Sept. 1997).

The ERRC researcher states that surveys of the police academy reflect that 80 per cent of students display high levels of racism; this percentage is reportedly worse than any other student group.

Jarmila Balazova reports that two years ago the Ministry of Interior conducted a survey in the police academy (25 Sept. 1997). The students were asked whether they would help a Romani child that they saw being attacked on the street. A large majority of the students surveyed said that they would not help the Romani child (ibid.; see also CEO 30 Sept. 1997). According to an interview conducted with Balazova by Central Europe Online (CEO), “all of those who said they would not help a Roma child are now on the streets- as police officers. Every year society produces a new generation of racists and we don’t do anything about it. If the government ignores the situation then the police, lawyers and judges will be among the racists” (30 Sept. 1997). She reports that an opinion poll conducted after the last election showed that the army and police voted in a large majority, approximately 70 per cent, for extremist parties, particularly the Communist and Republican parties (ibid.; Balazova 25 Sept. 1997). Balazova believes that very often racially motivated attacks on Roma are qualified as disorderly conduct and the paragraphs qualifying an incident as racially motivated are not put into practice (25 Sept. 1997).

Utterly charming, and if recent events are anything to go by – a whole lot of nothing has changed in the Czech Republic – except the official Canadian attitude has now reverted to the worst excesses of prejudice and outright bigotry. Let us not even discuss the utterly deplorably conduct of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs towards naturalized Canadian citizens abroad. These many be your ‘Canadian values’ in action but they are certainly not mine.