Migrants
are Central Europe’s new Roma
The
region’s nationalists reuse old attacks on new targets.
By BENJAMIN
CUNNINGHAM 4/5/16, 5:37 AM CET
BANSKÁ BYSTRICA,
Slovakia — There’s something familiar about the anti-migrant
language being used by politicians across Central Europe: It’s
almost the same as the traditional attacks on the Roma, long the
region’s most despised minority.
Hungarian Prime
Minister Viktor Orbán justified his reluctance to accept Muslim
migrants by arguing his country is already unduly burdened by its
Roma population.
Slovakia’s Prime
Minister Robert Fico played on familiar stereotypes about Roma as
self-isolating and dependent upon welfare when he insisted “90
percent” of asylum seekers arriving in Europe last September were
“economic migrants.”
On the campaign
trail ahead of this month’s parliamentary election, Fico repeatedly
insisted Muslims would be “impossible to integrate” while vowing
to prevent the creation of a “compact community” of migrants.
“Migrants have in
a certain sense become the new Roma for the Eastern European far
right.” — Tomáš Nociar, political scientist at Bratislava’s
Comenius University.
The use of such
imagery has helped fuel an anti-migrant fervor across Central Europe,
making the region one of the main roadblocks to a German-led effort
to establish an EU-wide policy on dealing with the migration crisis.
“If you would like
to be a politician here, just start talking about problems with Roma
and you will be a politician,” Ivan Mako, the victim of the first
crime ever categorized as racially motivated by the Slovak judicial
system, and who now runs an NGO.
“You will have
money, a topic and people will follow. That is all you need to climb
the political ladder,” he said. “Now it is the same thing with
migrants.”
A despised minority
Roma have been in
Europe since the Middle Ages, and form sizable minority populations
in countries like Slovakia, where they are estimated to account for 9
percent of the population. In Hungary, Roma are thought to be about
7.5 percent of the population; in the Czech Republic about 2 percent;
and Romania about 8.6 percent are Roma, according to the Council of
Europe.
There are also large
Roma minorities in countries like France and Italy, but in
post-communist Central Europe, where societies tend to be much more
mono-ethnic and Roma account for a much larger proportion of the
population, they have long stood out.
Now the region is
dealing with migrants. Hungary saw 300,000 pass through last year
before the government put up a border fence in October. Other
countries like Slovakia and Poland have almost none, but the issue is
still inflaming local politics.
“If there is a
strong prejudice against one group it increases the chances of
another — they correlate,” said Peter Kréko, director of
Political Capital, a Budapest based think tank. “Anti-Roma and
anti-Semitic sentiments usually move in parallel. In this case, it’s
anti-refugee sentiment as well. This is a dangerous phenomenon, like
an avalanche.”
Migrants, whether
real or theoretical, are a tempting target for nationalists, ranging
from Hungary’s right-wing Jobbik party to the neo-Nazis of
Slovakia’s People’s Party Our Slovakia (LSNS), which entered the
national parliament for the first time, riding a wave of
anti-establishment anger to 8 percent support in the March 5
elections.
Many of those
parties have unleashed attacks on mainly Muslim migrants making their
way into the EU in recent months, and they often used tropes that
have been brandished against the Roma for decades.
The party’s
website says LSNS wants to guarantee that citizens will not “be
terrorized by gypsies” and promises to avoid following the
“criminal policies of NATO, the USA and Israel.” They promote
“Christian values” in lieu of “Western liberalism which
encourages atheism, materialism, consumerism, dangerous sects and
sexual deviations.”
Marian Kotleba, the
LSNS leader who has been governor of this sparsely populated
mountainous region of central Slovakia for three years, has also
re-purposed old fashioned Roma scapegoating to tap into fear
generated by the migrant crisis.
In the past, Kotleba
has referred to Roma who “rape and kill.” During the election
campaign, Kotleba, who used to favor the black uniforms of Slovakia’s
collaborationist wartime government, was featured in billboards
proclaiming “Stop immigrants!”
“Migrants have, in
a certain sense, become the new Roma for the Eastern European
far-right,” said Tomáš Nociar, a political scientist studying the
far-right at Bratislava’s Comenius University.
Although human
rights groups have sought to highlight the plight of Roma in recent
years, mainstream politics largely shun the issue. In Europe, 90
percent of the more than 10 million Roma live below the poverty line
and just one-third have paid employment, according to the United
Nations Development Program.
Roma neighbors
Over the past two
decades most polls find discrimination toward Roma getting worse, not
better. A European Commission survey found that just 28 percent of
Hungarians would accept having a Roma neighbor, and the numbers are
even lower in Bulgaria (21 percent), Slovakia (17 percent) and the
Czech Republic (9 percent). A 2012 survey by the Czech Academy of
Sciences found that more than 80 percent of Czechs perceive relations
with the Roma minority as “generally bad.”
Linking migrants to
Roma pays political dividends. Support for Orbán’s Fidesz party
and the far-right Jobbik reached multi-year highs last fall when
migrants were camped out at Budapest’s Keleti station, and poll
numbers have remained steady even amid a major teacher’s strike.
This strong stand on migrants is selling.
“At the beginning
of the migrant crisis there was a debate, but the more you can bond
this issue to Roma, the most disliked group in Hungary, the easier it
is to sell your policy,” Kréko said. “It was a conscious part of
a communication strategy.”
That’s what Orbán
tried to do in a September speech.
“Hungary’s
historical given is that we live together with a few hundred thousand
Roma. This was decided by someone, somewhere,” he said. “We are
the ones who have to live with this, but we don’t demand from
anyone, especially not in the direction of the West, that they should
live together with a large Roma minority.”
The ploy worked, and
anti-migrant sentiment is now widespread. Earlier this month 80
percent of Hungarian respondents opposed taking asylum seekers as
part of an EU quota system, according to the Nezopont Institute.
Orbán also appeals
to the conspiratorial musings of extremists. When he refers to
“someone, somewhere” as responsible for the Roma now living in
Hungary, he tries to draw a parallel to EU directives pushing to
resettle Muslims, Kréko noted.
“The insinuation
is there must be some puppet-master pulling the strings — whether
it is bankers, the United States, Brussels bureaucrats, Jews or
George Soros,” he said. Soros, a financier of Hungarian-Jewish
background, figures in many regional conspiracy theories because of
his wealth and his support for pro-democracy movements across
post-communist Europe.
Although hard
demographic data about the current influx of migrants is difficult to
come by, most of these stereotypes directed at Roma were long ago
debunked.
Kotleba — who did
not respond to email requests and dispatched a burly receptionist to
brush back queries during a recent visit to his office — has blamed
welfare payments to Roma for draining the Slovak state budget.
But a 2014 study by
the Institute of Economic and Social Studies in Bratislava found that
total welfare payments for Roma and non-Roma account for less than 1
percent of public spending. The benefits going to an estimated
160,000 Roma children total about €44 million annually. For sake of
comparison, the annual Christmas bonuses sent to pensioners cost
about €65 million.
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