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Foreigners, go away!
by Alexander Mikhaylov
2008-08-12 09:14:15 |
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When you travel extensively, or indeed live in various countries for years, you cannot avoid getting acquainted with different cultures.
Personally, I always enjoy it, even though moving from place to place comes with a price, such as a culture shock, plain inconvenience, spontaneous anxiety and … oh yeah… an occasional taste of xenophobia and nationalism.
I try not to think about these things much, perhaps because for me it is a real issue: something that I experience on ‘my own hide’. Therefore, it is not surprising that the recent article in Prague Monitor Online arrested my attention. To give a better idea, I will quote a few paragraphs:
“Far-right party wants to relocate Roma to India"
Prague, July 30 (CTK) – The Czech National Party wants to succeed in the general election in 2010 with radical anti-Romany rhetoric formulated in 150-page study called “The final solution to the Gipsy Issue in the Czech Lands” that it will present in a month, Lidove noviny (LN) reported Wednesday.
The name evokes Nazi Germany and its final solution to the Jewish issue, but the nationalists claim they do not want to kill Romany, but that they want to buy land in India and to relocate the Romany there, LN writes.
The team of study authors is headed by party member Jiri Gaudin and party chairwoman Petra Edelmannova is also a member, according to party spokesman Pavel Sedlacek, LN writes.
The team was allegedly assisted by a few experts from “the academy environment”, who, however, request anonymity, LN writes.
Ivan Vesely, chairman of the Romany association Dzeno, told LN that the Romany ‘have lived here for 500 years and we are still considered foreigners.”
Sedlacek told LN the study looks at the Romany issue in a “comprehensive way-where it originated and why no one has as yet solved it.”
He said that the study concludes that repatriation is the sole possible solution after all other attempts to cope with the issue have failed.
“It must be solved on an all-European basis, land must be bought in India and the people must be given the opportunity to live on their land and according to their own ideas,” LN quotes from the study. “
Amazing stuff, isn’t? Buying land in India… I wonder what the Indians have to say to that, not to mention such a minor detail as a forceful deportation of your own citizens…Seems like the ideas of comrade Stalin are alive and well.
Unlike the Roma who lived in the Czech Land for 500 years, I spent a mere 6 years there. I cannot say these were bad years. When I came to Prague in 2000, it was not a member of the EU and it was bubbling with hopes of joining the Western World, getting an opportunity to travel visa-free and building Capitalist’s Economy. I found it a nice place and fun one as well. It had been, according to my buddy, a hard core expat from California who had lived in Prague since 1998, “A really crazy place, man, I mean, it is so liberal, you wouldn’t believe it. It had been even crazier a couple years ago. Service in supermarkets was terrible but the other things…For instance, guys used to go around the city smoking heroin openly and nobody minded, because even police had no idea how to react to that.”
Since then, I have heard many names, attributed to Prague. ‘The alcoholic capital of Europe,’ ‘Ecstasy heaven’, ‘Bordello of Easter Europe’ and so on… Speaking of the latter, the locals I became acquaintance with, warned me of ‘gypsy prostitutes’, populating Vaclavske Namesty – the central square of Prague. There had been a great number of girls with dark complexion lurking at many corners indeed, although I could not pinpoint their nationality with any degree of accuracy.
Speaking of the Roma, my first encounter with a local Roma happened on the third or fourth day upon my arrival to Prague, on an old square. The thing that struck me as unusual was that unlike many others he spoke decent English. (We had a nice chat and parted our ways ten minutes later. After that, I did not speak with local Roma often.)
During our fourth year in Prague, we rented an apartment in Liben, an inexpensive and pretty run down part of the city labelled as ‘gypsy district’. By that time, I was rather curious as to why Czechs always tended to speak of Roma with various degrees of disdain, using derogatory terms, such as ‘thieves’, ‘troublemakers’, ‘criminals’ and of course ‘outsiders’ and ‘foreigners’. The last term especially rang the bell to me, since I was a foreigner as well. On the other hand, how these people, apparently born in the country and speaking its language, could be regarded as ‘foreigners’? It was puzzling at first. Then things began to disturb me.
I recall one instance, when I was sitting in our living room writing (we were living on the fourth floor). Suddenly I heard violent screams outside. Just across the street, I saw a Roma girl lying on a pavement, curled in a foetal position, and a tall guy standing over her. (I recognized the girl: earlier that day I had ventured outside to buy cigarettes and I spotted her fishing beer and plastic bottles from a dumpster and placing them into a cardboard box). Now the smashed box was resting on its side with all the bottles scattered around.
The screams and bellows I had heard a moment ago were of the Czech guy: as I continued to watch, astounded by all this, he yelled something hysterically and kicked the girl a few times, aiming at her head. (The girl lay motionless, covering her head with her elbows). Finally, the guy stepped aside, threw an arm in Nazi salute, yelled ‘Heil Hitler!’ and ran into the nearest bush. The whole incident took only several moments, during which I experience a whirlwind of sorts, such as ‘Must I call the police? Run after the bastard?’ The funny thing was that a few passers-by happening to be on the street just took a detour and went on walking. Meanwhile the girl got up and began to collect her bottles.
Was it a common sight? I must admit it was not, although by that time I heard enough similar stories, not to mention gruesome tales of the other kind, such as setting homeless people who were sleeping on park benches, on fire.
But to return to Roma… I still remember with an uneasy feeling as my wife, who had taught English at that time, told me how solid professional men of Roma nationality tend to hide it from their co-workers. Strangely enough, even a person with dark complexion was considered a ‘normal’ Czech if he/she was dressed in a business suit and had an office. The envious colleagues just commented on their ‘great tan’.
I recalled times when she had conducted English classes for adults (some government workers) and if the discussions touched Roma issue, people’s reaction was nearly always the same: ‘They are different from us. They are like foreigners and they are lazy, and they hate to work and they prefer to steal instead of earning their income.’ Questions such as ‘In what way they are different from you guys?’ the answer was always ‘Eh…Well… They are just different. They are not Czechs.’
‘They are not Czech.’ Apparently, this is another ‘hot spot’ that many Czechs love to argue. It might be summarized in a simple statement such as ‘No matter how long you live in Czech Republic, no matter what language you speak, you will never be like us - so do not even try.’
The Czech’s dislike of Roma goes back centuries. But what about Chinese and Vietnamese emigrants, who began to arrive to the capital of the Czech Republic only recently? Nowadays Prague is peppered with tiny food and liquor stores, run by them and their families. During my Prague days I always found these stores the most convenient places (their owners run their stores from an early morning till late at night, including all major holidays, when the rest of the city is virtually dead and your chances of buying any necessities are practically nil).
And how the locals, who shop in these stores all the time, feel about these industrious shopkeepers? ‘Money grabbing bastards.’ ‘Should be deported from the country at once.’ How many a time I witnessed some drunken, red-faced fellow, who popped in for another couple of beers to cure his hangover, bawling at a storekeeper, only because the storekeeper spoke Czech but with a terrible, terrible accent, which was so hard to understand! I believe that the very fact that the Chinese and Vietnamese are ready to run their business at all hours offends the local population. Why? ‘Because it only shows how money hungry they are. Therefore they should not be allowed.’
Speaking of ‘strangers in a strange land’, the attitude of many Czechs to foreigners in general always baffled me, to say the least. Once I came across a short article in an English language college newspaper, written by a student, who, I am sure, was not innocent of multiculturalism. The article was a long reminiscence of a nice spring afternoon. The author had been walking along one of the central streets of Prague, enjoying her ice cream and warm breeze, when her gaze suddenly fell on a group of drunken Brits. (Due to the low beer prices, Prague is still popular with British guys as a place for stag parties).
After some lamentation on ‘how terrible it is to witness these rowdy people on our streets’ she proposed a simple solution ‘To paint a parts of sidewalk in yellow and to bar them with something (barbed wire?) from the rest of the pedestrian area, so all these drunken foreigners could ‘laugh like crazy, puke on the asphalt and litter their designated strips, without bothering the local population.’
I remember I had been astonished at the sheer number of graffiti that disfigures the faces of many Prague buildings. When I asked some local once ‘why there are so many graffiti around Prague?’ the answer was ‘That’s the work of all these damn foreigners. They come to our city for exactly this purpose – to destroy the look of our streets.’ And those foreigners even took pains to learn to spell in Czech better than I could learn in my six years there. Amazing.
Many a time, when I rode a metro, I witnessed a somewhat funny picture. A group of foreigners comes in and starts talking and laughing loudly. The rest of the passengers stare at them morosely and try to move away, as if these foreigners were lepers. A typical explanation of such an attitude is simply this ‘Foreigners do not know how to behave themselves. They are nearly always bad mannered. We never laugh in public transport like crazy. We never behave like this.’
I guess that ever since the Czech Republic joined the European Union, this somewhat xenophobic attitude must be growing… I recall that when I had first come to Prague there had been many people, who spoke or at least tried to speak English to me. (Which is why I have never learned Czech language to any serious extend). Six years later, they ceased to speak English almost entirely. I often wondered why…
Some merry Czech entrepreneurs went as far as creating a ‘humorous’ online blog, designed as bogus ‘marriage site’. It describes, also in a ‘humorous’ form various types of foreigners, supposedly seeking marriage, each man’s ‘profile’ completed with detailed inscription, from ‘Single Russian Mafioso, who likes his vodka and who walks up to his knees in blood’, ‘Ageing Brit with alcohol problem who loves prostitutes’, ‘Money grabbing American’ and so on. And the tag line inquired: ‘Do you really want them at your home?’
I do not say that the Czechs as a nation are bad people or the Czech Republic is a country of nationalistic morons. All I want to say that unfortunately, such an attitude is not original. A grumpy repairman back in Turku, Finland, who came to fix electricity, on our question ‘Do you speak English?’ angrily snapped ‘Aren’t we in Finland? Why the Hell should I?’ The conversation was carried out in Finnish, but I still don’t know (and unlikely to learn) Finnish for ‘busted plugs’. Or, as one kind soul told me: ‘Nowadays things in Finland are much improved. A few years ago employers refused to hire people who spoke Finnish … with an accent.’
As to Roma, a dislike towards them still seems to be nearly universal. I cannot help but recall another, personal incident: when my family and I was running away from the Soviet Union in 1989, it so happened that one day we were standing on a street of Budapest, homeless and without money to pay for food or shelter for the night. I think it were Roma, who stood there on the same street, selling clothes, handmade jewellery and all such stuff, and who made a room for us, when we had tried to sell some of our clothes, my wife’s ring and a couple of my kid’s toys.
I still see it as if it was yesterday: good people of Budapest passing us by, asking ‘What’s your nationality?’ and upon hearing the word ‘Russians’, breaking into a happy laughter, pointing at us with their fingers. I guess to them it was the sign of the ultimate justice – here they are, damn Red occupants, standing next to gypsies. Can one get any lower than that?
gypsy Romany Czech Racism |
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