Panicked Roma communities in Hungary are forming self-defense groups after a spate of attacks on their settlements claimed five lives in 10 months. The murders have led police to double the size of a task force investigating anti-Roma crimes and police sources believe the same group may be responsible for attacks using rifles and homemade explosives. Far-right groups have denied any links to the attacks, but emphasize the need to fight “Gypsy crime.”
“We’re getting organized,” says Gyula Borsi, a Roma leader in Tiszalok, northeast Hungary, where the latest victim was buried last week.
“We have no other choice. We won’t permit our members to carry weapons of any sort,” he said. “No guns, no axes.”
The new Roma civil defense groups will patrol until dawn in groups of six in the streets of the cigany-telepek — the ghettoes where the Roma of eastern Europe are usually found.
Ninety percent of Roma interviewed in Hungary in a recent EU survey said discrimination because of ethnic origin was widespread, followed by 83 percent in the Czech Republic and 81 percent in Slovakia. The report, by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, found “high levels of discrimination and victimization among the Roma in the seven member states surveyed.”
The figures for Hungary are particularly alarming, because until now, the country had claimed to have one of the more enlightened pro-Roma policies in the region. There are elected local minority councils, a system of scholarships for secondary and higher education and carefully calibrated funds for schools to try to ensure classes have no more than 25 percent minority pupils.
In the Czech Republic, 500 activists of the far-right Workers Party attacked a Roma settlement in Litvinov, north of Prague last November, with machetes, pitchforks and Molotov cocktails. Three hundred Roma, also armed, gathered to defend their community. At least seven riot police and seven demonstrators were injured in running battles.
In Hungary, the latest victim of the attacks on the Roma, 54-year-old Jeno Koka was buried in Tiszalok on Wednesday, with all the honor and pageant that a poor, marginalized community can muster. Hundreds of mourners came from miles around.
“A storm has descended on us,” Sandor Gaal, the Protestant bishop of eastern Hungary, told the assembled crowd.
Tiszalok recently came third in a national league for offenses per head of the population. At 20 percent, unemployment is double the national average. Factories are closing, or cutting their workforces, as a result of the recession.
Liberal commentators say Roma have now replaced Jews as the main butt of middle-class hostility in eastern Europe. Jobbik, a far-right party hostile to the Roma, won only 2 percent in the last elections, but now expects to easily break the 5 percent threshold and enter parliament in the next.
Its party Web site states: “The phenomenon of Gypsy crime is a unique form of delinquency which is different from the crimes of the majority in nature and force.”
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