Czech Update

Amnesty finds little improvement in Roma discrimination

Dominik Lukeš — Fri, 30 May 2008 21:43:13 -0400

Unfortunately, a new report from Amnesty International found the situation of the Roma minority as dire as in the past from unequal treatment by the police, through limited access to social services, to negative attitudes by non-Roma Czechs.

Amnesty Int'l: Roma Discrimination in ČR persists - Czechnews - Aktuálně.cz New York - Czech Romani population continues to be subjected to discrimination and intolerance. This is clear from the annual report of the US-based non-governmental organization Amnesty International (AI).
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AI finds that Czech Roma are harassed, threatened with violence and forced to confess to minor offences during police interrogations.
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AI also mentions public opinion polls that showed that 9 out of 10 Czechs would not want to have a Roma person as a neighbor.

How have Czech values changed?

Dominik Lukeš — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 16:55:17 -0400

If you're wondering about what Czech views on this or that are, you could do worse than going to the excellent World Values Survey and use their Online Data Analysis. Just remember that values have many more dimensions than what can be gleaned from questionnaires.

World Values Survey Welcome to the World Values Survey website. This is a place to learn more about values and cultural changes in societies all over the world.

Czech population highest in 10 years, foreigners help

Dominik Lukeš — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 07:43:50 -0400

Čechů je nejvíce za posledních deset let - www.lidovky.cz
Česko mělo na konci letošního prvního čtvrtletí nejvíc obyvatel za posledních deset let. V zemi žilo 10,306.700 lidí. Za první čtvrtletí se jejich počet zvedl o 19.500, a to hlavně díky příchodu cizinců.

The commonly bemoaned decrease in population growth has been, at least termporarily, halted. There seem to more newly-borns than the sadly-departed and the minor influx of foreigners is also a positive factor.

Unfortunate end to recruitment of the Roma to Czech police force

Dominik Lukeš — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 05:10:26 -0500

Romano Vodi - Romany applicants fail to meet Czech police criteria-press - News
None of 7 Romanies who applied for jobs in the municipal police of the town of Most has met the required criteria and the police will therefore not have any Romanies in its ranks, the daily Mlada fronta Dnes writes in its north Bohemian edition today.

The Romany candidates who would have been sent for a six-month re-qualification course funded from European Union funds if admitted, did not even pass through the initial introductory interview, the paper says.

"A clean criminal record was the main demand and at least three of the applicants did not have it. Some of the Romanies even could not read or write in the Czech language properly. Their appearance and behaviour showed no signs of the ability to cope with the required amount of learning material, including legal rules and other demands," Lubos Trojna from the Most municipal police says.

The final statement from the police spokesman are particularly revealing. To expect Roma applicants to pass initial interviews where they are judged on appearance and behavior is setting the bar surprisingly high. No matter how 'enlightened' the interviewer, this is precisely the sort condition where any latent discriminatory tendencies (and they are usually less than latent in the Czech police) are most likely to assert themselves. Perhaps a better way would have been to provide a proper course to the applicants and then send them in front of the police.

Still debating Romany holocaust

Dominik Lukeš — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 04:44:47 -0500

Committee wants Czech govt to work for Lety pig farm's removal
Prague- The Czech committee for compensation of the Romany Holocaust victims today gave CTK a copy of an open letter it has sent to the government asking it to take steps to remove the pig farm in Lety, south Bohemia, that stands on the site of a World War Two camp in which Romanies were gathered.

The extermination attempts of the Roma in the Czech protectorate by the Nazis is one of the underreported features of WWII. One of the reasons given for that is that the Roma concentration camp near Pilsen was mostly staffed by Czechs. To add insult to injury there is now a pig farm on the site which the Czech government has so far failed to relocate.

European Jews satisfied with situation of Czech Jewish community

Dominik Lukeš — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 10:29:28 -0500

European Jews satisfied with situation of Czech Jewish community - Prague Daily Monitor Prague, Jan 10 (CTK) - The president of the European Jewish Congress (EJC) Pierre Besnainou is satisfied with the situation of the local Jewish community and attitudes of other citizens, especially politicians, towards it, he said during a meeting with Czech President Vaclav Klaus today, Tomas Kraus told CTK.

After mostly negative stories of ethnic relations in the Czech Republic comes a relatively uplifting one.

Czechs most like Slovaks, least Romanies

Dominik Lukeš — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 09:02:31 -0500

Czechs most like Slovaks, least Romanies-poll - Prague Daily Monitor
Prague, Jan 8 (CTK) - Czechs consider themselves the most likeable of all ethnic groups living in the Czech Republic, according to a poll by the CVVM centre carried out last December and released today.

Out of foreigners, Czech most like Slovaks and they also like Poles and Germans very much, while they harbour the least sympathy to Romanies and people from the Balkan countries are not very popular among Czechs, according to the poll.

Almost all respondents - 96.6 percent - described Czechs as very likeable people and 91.4 percent similarly assessed Slovaks, followed by Poles - 73.4 percent and Germans - 59 percent

Did we just see a poll on this a month ago? But this time we have some interesting numbers:

Only 9.4 percent of respondents said they liked Romanies very much while 76.1 percent said they did not like them.

Sad but not surprising.

A distinctly negative assessment was given by respondents to Balkan countries´ nationals (45.7 percent) and foreigners from the former Soviet Union (45.1 percent).

This is probably mostly a result of the long enmity towards the Soviet Union after 1968.

Almost half of respondents - 44 percent - expressed their sympathy towards Jews, while 22.7 percent of Czechs assess them negatively.

It would interesting to see these numbers broken down in more detail. Czech anti-semitism is a strange beast with prominent historical and literary figures in both camps. Today, I would imagine, most anti-Semitism is imported.

"It is only respondents over 60 who often assess Germans negatively," CVVM says.

That again, is not surprising, although, I suspect that there would also be a fair bit of regional variation with the border regions tending toward the negative.

Most people - 58.9 percent - believe that foreigners should adapt themselves to the local culture as quickly as possible, while 5.6 percent of Czechs hold the opposite view.

Again, no surprises here but it should be pointed out that with the level of immigration at about 2.5% of the population, Czechs in general, probably don't have very good images of what such adaptation would look like and how to deal with it on a day-to-day basis.

Most people - 58.9 percent - believe that foreigners should adapt themselves to the local culture as quickly as possible, while 5.6 percent of Czechs hold the opposite view.

Czech nationalism and the president

Dominik Lukeš — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 21:24:43 -0500

Klaus fears Schwarzenberg would not defend Czech interests -press
The foreign minister must "defend the interests of the Czech Republic clearly, sharply and out of his own conviction," Klaus writes.

He says that Schwarzenberg is linked with the Czech Republic only by a smaller part of his life and property, and that he has come in contact with the normal life of Czech people only marginally.

This is a good example of some of the national prejudices that the president is exploiting here (no different, though, from the recent concerns in the US about Senators swearing on the Quoran). Czechs have a long history of mistrust of Austria and Germany so Klaus' remarks are not surprising (if misguided). However, this nationalism isn't as strong as it once was so it will be interesting to follow how it resonates with the populace.

Czech Romanies face discrimination at work, school

Dominik Lukeš — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 06:17:12 -0500

Czech Romanies face discrimination at work, school -- report
According to the report by the European Network Against Racism (ENAR), there is both latent and open discrimination in the Czech Republic and it is most often Romanies who are its victims. But the report says that racism is not dramatic in the country.
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The Raxen report states that Romanies are discriminated against on the labour market mainly not because of their ethnicity, but because employers in general believe that they do not work well and do not attend work regularly.

The report says that Romanies have been moved to the outskirts of municipalities. It writes that up to 80,000 Romanies live in ghettos.
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Raxen report says that Romany children continue to be "segregated" in education as they are sometimes automatically placed in special elementary schools for slower pupils, and do not achieve higher education as a result.

Much less in the spirit of holiday cheer yet another report on the sorry fate of the Roma minority in the Czech Republic comes out. Particularly interesting is the spin that is put on the report by the Czech news agency: the Roma are not discriminated because of ethnicity but because their employers believe they do not work well. This, of course, is how much of racism manifests itself - economic segregation through ethnic prejudice. Racists all over the world say: I don't have anything against them but they just don't want to be like me. This also dovetails with the statement that "racism is not dramatic in the country". This is accurate in the sense of 'scientific racism' that is explicit belief that other races are "biologically" inferior. And in that sense the Czechs have a long tradition of anti-racism. However, where it matters, the Czech Roma are in a position of a discriminated minority and it doesn't make much difference what ideology is behind it.

Czech racist joke at election rally

Dominik Lukeš — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 10:58:53 -0500

United Press International - NewsTrack - Czech racist joke at election rally
PRAGUE, Czech Republic, Feb. 1 (UPI) -- Czech Prime Minister Jiri Paroubek is trying to downplay a racist joke made by a comedian at a campaign stop ahead of June elections.

The joke targeted the country's minority Gypsy population, whom polls show are commonly stereotyped by Czechs.

The BBC reports television comedian Jiří Krampol has been touring with Paroubek and called Gypsies thieves.

Paroubek allegedly smiled at the jokes.

He and a Gypsy musician regularly featured on Krampol's show defended the comedian and said the jokes weren't racist.

The jokes have since been deleted from the routine.

Polls show that Czechs believe Gypsies are lazy and won't integrate into society. A recent survey showed most Czechs don't want to live by Gypsies.

Jiří Krampol is a popular entertainer, famous, among others for a routine in the 1980s using a parody of vietnamese worker to lampoon the communist regime. I have no doubt, that he and many other Czechs, would not perceive a joke such as this racist. (I'm always reminded of the Czech judge who claimed that an attack on a Roma youth could not be racially motivated because, the Roma are technically the same race as white Czechs.) This is a problem because Czech attitudes to the Gypsy minority are severely discriminatory and xenophobic but at the same time there is a Czech tradition of anti-racism which is part of the Czech ethos (if not practice). That's why many people who exhibit racist behavior don't recognize themselves as doing so which makes any debate all the more difficult.

Czech Jewish community experiences rebirth after fall of communism

Dominik Lukeš — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 16:51:17 -0500

Czech Jewish community experiences rebirth after fall of communism - 27-01-2006 - Radio Prague
The Czech Republic marks Holocaust Remembrance Day on Friday, January 27th, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in 1945. Some 80,000 Bohemian and Moravian Jews perished in the Holocaust, and before the community could even start recovering from the war, the communist regime practically froze its activities. It was not until the fall of communism in 1989 that the Czech Jewish community could start to rebuild.

An interesting interview with the director of the Prague Jewish museum.

Czech traditions and German influence

Dominik Lukeš — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 08:23:47 -0500

The Prague Post Online
Experts agree that proper Olomouc cheese, or Olomoucké tvarůžky, should be moist and slightly sticky, with a lustrous, translucent layer on the outside. The inside, by contrast, should be firm but not tough, its color somewhere between light beige and creamy white. And then there is the characteristic smell.
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But is it authentically Czech? On that point hangs a debate stirring up the EP [European Parliament]. Tvarůžky and another of the country's favorite products — thin, sweet wafers from Karlovy Vary known as oplatky — are at the center of an argument between Czech, German and Austrian members of the EP.
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Germans and Austrians are against granting Czechs a PDO for Karlovy Vary wafers and Olomouc cheese, arguing the two products were traditionally made by Germans living in Czechoslovakia before the end of World War II.
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Some 30 Czech products are currently awaiting PDO approval by the European Commission, including gingerbread from Pardubice and carp from Třeboň.

Interesting. But certainly more interesting is the historical and cultural background of the story.

First, the traditional products and foods:

olomoucké tvarůžky also known as smradlavý sýr - smelly cheese - a popular and well-known type of cheese with a pungent odor
karlovarské oplatky - thin Carlsbad wafers popular as a souvenir for those returning from their favourite spa town
jihočeský/třeboňský kapr - carp from the ponds of Southern Bohemia, such as the famous one near Třeboň. Carp, of course, is a traditional Czech Chritmas Eve dish eaten with potato salad.

Second, there is the influence of German culture and traditions in Czech history that was suddenly interrupted by the expulsion of most Czech Germans as a retaliation for World War II after 1945. One of the most famous "Czech" writers - Kafka wrote in German. Goethe, a frequent visitor to Carlsbad, supposedly said of Prague that it is the most beautiful German city. In Three Men on a Bummel Jerome K. Jerome and friends visit Prague but only as part of their trip to "Germany". Many of the things that make the Czech lands famous have a German connection (historically for instance, silver mining - giving rise to the word - dollar). Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia) are also the birthplace of some famous German speakers - Freud, Husserl, Mahler, Porsche, Kafka, etc.

Unfortunately (but probably inevitably), the emphasis on the many contentious moments in the history of Czech-German (and that in this case includes Austrians) relations makes an appreciation of the positive aspects of German influence difficult for Czech society at large. The slights cited go all the way back to St Wensceslas, John Hus (and the Hussite wars) and continue through through to the Hapsburg rule (and Germanization attempts after 1621) and of course to the German protectorate (including Teresienstadt and Lidice) during WWII.