BHHRG

A visit to Roma communities in Eastern Slovakia following recent unrest brought about by sharp reductions in social security payments.

Eastern Slovakia Today

As the  accession date for 10 new member states to join the EU drew closer in the early months of 2004, worries started to be raised in the British media about the likelihood of mass immigration to the UK from the 8 former Communist accession countries. The tabloid press, in particular, focused on the thousands of poverty-stricken Roma people living in economically disadvantaged areas like Eastern Slovakia predicting that many of them would come to  the UK after 1st May thus overburdening the country’s  generous but overstretched social security system.[1]
The British Helsinki Human Rights Group has reported regularly from Slovakia and, in 1998, was one of the first human rights group’s to visit the now notorious Lunik 1X  housing complex on the outskirts of the eastern Slovakian city of Košice  where Roma residents had been moved from their previous homes in the centre of town.[2] The Group also visited the town of Usti nad Labem in the Czech Republic in 1998 and 1999 where tensions had arisen over the construction of a fence to separate the Roma communities from the town’s Czech residents.[3]  At this time, several   hundred Czech Romanies  applied for asylum in the United Kingdom allegedly after hearing about  the country’s generous benefit system from the Czech Republic’s Nova TV channel. BHHRG visited the British port city of Dover where violence had broken out between local youths and the newcomers.[4]
BHHRG revisited Košice and the surrounding area in March 2004 to investigate the problems faced by Eastern Slovakia’s  large Roma community after  riots and looting occurred in February following the coming into force  of new legislation intended to harmonize the country‘s social security laws with the EU  and which severely curtailed benefits paid to the country’s large number of unemployed. As the overwhelming majority of Roma in Slovakia have no jobs, this change in the benefit system severely impacted on their already parlous financial situation.[5]
The Group’s representatives visited  6 Roma settlements in the Spiš region west of Košice and further east, towards the Ukrainian and Hungarian borders. They talked at length with  Roma residents as well as local people who had become embroiled in some of the unrest. At the time of the visit the situation had calmed down but most of the underlying problems that led to the outbreak of violence remain unresolved.
Košice is Slovakia’s second city lying 400 kilometres to the east of the capital Bratislava. Although it is now almost 15 years since the velvet revolution that ended Communist rule in what was Czechoslovakia, travel between the two cities has scarcely improved with only sporadic patches of motorway linking them. The absence of a modern road network has impacted heavily on the eastern region of the country contributing to its  high level of unemployment. Shabby, rundown towns like Prešov and Košice itself  are a testament to the despondency that goes with long term joblessness brought about by the closure of local enterprises in the early 1990s. BHHRG was told that large numbers of young people had left the  area already and, judging by the near absence of life on the streets of central Košice at night, this seemed all too likely.
The only major piece of foreign investment to have entered Eastern Slovakia since the country’s independence is the Košice steel works, bought by US Steel in 2000 and which now  provides 24,000 jobs in the town – down from 40,000 during its Communist heyday. The Spiš region’s copper and iron ore mines that once employed thousands of people, including local Roma,  were closed soon after 1989.
However, the agricultural sector still operates and, unlike the Baltic States, Poland and Bulgaria, for example, the region grows a variety of crops including beet and maize. Dutch agribusinesses which have made inroads into the Polish countryside are probably  deterred by the logistical difficulties of reaching the Košice region. However, should this sector implode -  which is a strong possibility under  the EU’s common agricultural policy proposals for distributing funds to the new entrants, the prospects for employment in that sector of the economy are bleak.
West of Košice lies the Spiš region which is only a short distance from the Tatra mountains, once the winter sports playground of Czechoslovakia. Many of its small towns and villages contain beautiful Gothic churches many with painted alter pieces and frescoes,  the most notable being the hillside town of Levoča where the church of St. James houses several priceless 16th century carved alter pieces by the local craftsman, Meister Pavel. With proper infrastructure and carefully targeted policies this part of Slovakia could have been a magnet for up–market tourism but it has been cruelly neglected. On the one hand,  unemployment among ordinary Slovaks is leading to depopulation while the growing number of Roma who live in squalid circumstances in and around some of these heritage sights makes it ever less likely that cultural tourism can be established there.