Slovak politicians, including the former prime minister Robert Fico (SMER-SD) and the far-right extremist leader Marian Kotleba, have long used the Roma minority as a convenient scapegoat in their polarising political agenda. For decades, Roma have been the easiest target to blame for all the country’s problems.

Fico has repeatedly said that Roma people “make money by making babies” or have abused the welfare system, while Kotleba and the MPs in his People’s Party Our Slovakia (LSNS) have often dehumanised Roma people by calling them “parasites”. Milan Mazurek, an MP for Kotleba’s party, was even sentenced by the Supreme Court for making racist remarks about Roma people in 2019, losing his parliamentary mandate as a result.
Belak, the author of the new study, accepts that there are many problems in the segregated Roma communities, but says that the people are not the ones to blame. The most problematic locations, often presented in Slovak media as almost “symptomatic”, have one thing in common: that at some point in history, the municipality took some kind of discriminatory or violent measure against the particular Roma community. “This is what connects all of the most critical places,” Belak noted.
In a loose comparison, the trend is reminiscent of the renewed discussions in Western Europe about the implications of the colonial era, or in the USA about the heritage of slavery and racial discrimination. Slovakia, in this sense, is no different. “The majority is not willing to take any sort of responsibility,” said Belak, who called it an “indirect form of racism”.
“Based on these ‘fair rules’, Roma people from the settlements are still stuck on this lowest starting point, and they don’t have a voice,” he said.

Link: https://balkaninsight.com/2020/09/30/slovak-roma-strive-for-better-lives-despite-extreme-poverty-report-finds/?fbclid=IwAR1XaorFkM3jK8vTFN4WvA1Eh7hf660tEkeyD-YF_o-kDKQaDUgkmQLhobE

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