While it is within the rights of the buildings’ owner not to prolong the tenants‘ leases, the situation is further complicated by the fact the tenants in question are Roma. There are over two hundred thousand Romani living in the Czech Republic, and roughly half of them are “integrated“, meaning they have a home, have graduated school and have a stable income. Nevertheless, they still face racism on a daily basis. The remaining half is deemed “maladjusted“, ‘inadaptable“ ‘uncivilized”, or, in more accurate terms, socially marginalized.
The City Council has outright stated that Brno lacks the capacity to accommodate dozens of large families and the chances of a Roma family being able to find accommodation in a privately owned building are essentially non-existent. As is, curiously enough, any initiative aimed at actually solving the problem: according to Czech TV, the City Hall claims it contacted the real estate agent while the company in question, Dolfin Real Estate, stated it was never approached. What we have here is a paradoxical dance; the two bodies’ movements are perfectly choreographed to avoid any contact whatsoever, possibly in the hope that the rapidly approaching winter will solve the problem for them, or at least allow the considerably less crowded cemeteries and crematoriums to take part in resolving this housing crisis. The imagery is, obviously, absurd (especially considering the temperature during an average Czech winter) but it shows the typical official response to the problem: close your eyes and hope it goes away. [...]
The leitmotif resounding throughout the Romani housing issues is the omnipresence of racism in our culture. We are not talking about just a couple hundred extremist crackpots or some kind of faceless ignorant mass: racism is prevalent in the system itself. We live in a country where the Vice Premier, who just happens to be one of the most popular politicians and quite possibly the most powerful man in the country, openly denied the Roma holocaust, a country where the deputy ombudsman, of all people, states that refusing to employ the Roma is not discrimination but simply the result of past experience , a country that sends Romani children to practical and special schools for no reason other than „normal“ parents of „normal“ kids not wanting their little darlings threatened by those mean, nasty ethnic minorities. In short, being racist in the Czech Republic is not only perfectly OK, but also fashionable, as it clearly deals a blow in the on-going war against the scourge of political correctness, whatever it may be.
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