Czech activist: Threats to institutionalize ghetto children were made illegally

According to the Konexe civic association, the situation in the Předlice quarter of Ústí nad Labem is deteriorating and the town is not doing anything about it. Miroslav Brož of Konexe has harshly criticized the town leadership at a session of the town council, as well as the nonprofit organizations collaborating with the town. News server Romea.cz is publishing the speech he gave there on 7 March in full translation.

Speech by Miroslav Brož of the Konexe association at the town council meeting on 7 March 2013

Town councilors, esteemed town officials and members of the public,

Our town is facing a crisis. The time bomb of the Předlice ghetto has ticked its last. It will explode soon – very soon. The years during which you played possum and ignored this situation are gone, wasted. If you don’t take the right steps to resolve this situation immediately, now, and I really mean right away, not within a few months or even the next few weeks, the situation will end in a humanitarian catastrophe in the Czech Republic of unseen dimensions, for which you will bear responsibility. In the Předlice ghetto there are buildings occupied by families with children that are at risk of immediately collapsing and burying their occupants.

The catastrophe that reigns over the Předlice ghetto today did not arise overnight. The situation of the ghetto and its occupants gradually accelerated and deteriorated, day after day, month after month, year after year, and it is continuing to deteriorate. The worst thing of all is that it is deteriorating more and more rapidly. How far do you want to let it go?

What are the causes of the crisis in Předlice today? There are several. Just like the Romani community in Předlice, I perceive the main cause as lying in the privatization of the quarter as a whole and of its housing stock into the hands of "dubious entrepreneurs", as the kind euphemism has it. That means into the hands of criminal elements, drug dealers, and loan sharks. These people have ruled Předlice ever since with an iron fist, drawing on poor people’s housing supplements to fatten their own bank accounts and running the drug business for the entire town from their base in Předlice. They are grinding the mass of impoverished Romani people living in their buildings to the bone.

Předlice today works as a kind of pump delivering money from the welfare system – money that is supposed to be aiding poor Romani people – into the bank accounts of these criminals. I protest this, I disagree with it! To this day I do not understand this privatization. Could selling an entire neighborhood to the mafia not have been avoided? Who bears responsibility for this?

I want to inform you that the residents of Předlice and impoverished people in our town generally pay the highest rents here. In Předlice, for a dirty one-room cubicle, they pay the same, if not more, as they would for a spacious category one apartment at a peaceful housing estate.

In the years following the privatization, the situation in Předlice deteriorated and deteriorated, and not a single politician took any interest. Over the last approximately five years, the situation has reached the stage of an acute crisis.

The first tenement houses to collapse in Předlice did so in 2010. It was a miracle, an enormous piece of good luck, that no one was injured and no one died. That is also probably why nothing more was done. The responsible town officials did not take any steps to address the alarming situation.

In September 2012 another building collapsed and this time a young woman, the mother of young children, died in the ruins. It was not until this event that the town snapped out of its lethargy.

At this point in the story I will have to speculate a little, because information about Předlice and the resolution of this catastrophe is being kept secret by our town government and is negotiated behind the scenes, not transparently, but through lobbying and in secret. The results of these negotiations are carefully kept under wraps.

So, according to unverified information leaks, we have reconstructed the situation as follows:  After the 2012 building collapse, the town, or rather its Building Works Authority, sent a structural engineer to Předlice in October of that year to compile a list of buildings that are no longer habitable and are in danger of collapse. That list was kept secret.

One of the buildings on it, number 106 on Beneše Lounského street, was occupied by families with children. The building had not been damaged by tenants, as the antigypsyist media misinformed the public, but its flooring and all of its wooden elements were afflicted with dry rot.

A group started meeting at the town hall which was given various names – the Mayoral Action Group, the Crisis Committee, the Working Group – but its composition was almost always the same:  Town representatives, the Municipal Police, the town’s adviser on the Romani issue, the big NGOs, and the Czech Government Agency for Social Inclusion. That group decided to evacuate the families from building no. 106 against their will, first into the gym of a local primary school, where they spent nine long days in undignified conditions. They were then moved by truck to an infamously usurious residential hotel in the Krásné Březno quarter. This operation of forcibly deporting these families cost, according to information presented at the last town council session, almost CZK 200 000 – please keep this number in mind.

In order to break down the families’ resistance to this forced move, they were illegally, repeatedly, and scandalously threatened with the institutionalization of their children should they not comply.

What is extraordinarily interesting, if not piquant, to us about all of this, is that during these threats to take the children away there were no state child welfare authorities from OSPOD (Oddělení sociálně právní ochrany dětí – the Department of Social-Legal Protection of Children) present. Practically speaking, such authorities are technically the only people who can remove children from their families on the basis of a court order. According to our unverified information, the Ústí branch of OSPOD refused to participate in these scandalous and, I repeat, ILLEGAL threats to remove children from their families.

Using OSPOD as their bogey-man, without the presence of any of its staffers, members of the Crisis Committee delivered these threats to the families. "Boo! Evil OSPOD will come to take your children to the orphanage if you don’t submit to the solution we have designed for you." I disagree with this! I protest it! The entire matter is now being investigated by the ombudsman and I am convinced it will end in bringing enormous shame on those involved.

When this so-called Crisis Committee was preparing this forced removal of the families into the usurious residential hotel in Krásné Březno, it did not negotiate with the owner of that building, the CPI Byty company, but only with the loan-shark, the operator of the residential hotel leasing the building. CPI didn’t learn that families from Předlice were being moved into their building by a so-called Crisis Committee until they saw it on the tv "news". What more can we add to this? Perhaps just the observation that CPI, on the basis of that television report, at long last evaluated the state of that building and decided to close the residential hotel on the premises.

The story of the first building in Předlice to be evacuated has a happy ending. Our activists managed during the course of just a few days to find dignified substitute accommodation in category one apartments for normal rents, not in the ghetto, for the families in the residential hotel – and not just for the ones deported there from Předlice. We managed to do this with the aid of media pressure and roughly CZK 70 000 in donations from our supporters. For that amount of money we paid deposits and first month’s rents for the residential hotel occupants, all of the fees associated with changing their identification to their new addresses, and the inspection of their apartments and installation of electricity meters in them. Compare that to the absurd amount of the CZK 200 000 that was allegedly spent on housing people in a gym and then sending them by truck to a residential hotel. When compared to the budgets and subsidies paid out to all the institutions that are supposed to be addressing this issue, the amount of money spent to ultimately resolve it was ridiculously low.

What was also absurd about this whole case was how the town made excuses the entire time for the owner of building no. 106, a person who is not to be taken seriously. They used him as an alibi for why they were not helping the people living in his building. Of course, from a purely legal viewpoint, it is true that the owner, a dubious trafficker in poverty, was obligated to take care of providing housing to the families who had regularly been paying him overpriced rents. The fact that the town has sued him, and that the court may issue a verdict several years from now, did not help these families at all. Moreover, building no. 106 has just one owner, but other buildings in Předlice do not have transparent ownership structures – they are now owned by collections agencies, shell owners, etc.

Yesterday the town finally, after many months, published its secret list of uninhabitable buildings in Předlice. That list is of laughably poor quality. The buildings on it are the most obvious disasters, the unoccupied ruins. That list is proof of the fact that the town DOES NOT HAVE knowledge of the situation in Předlice and knows nothing about the actual state of affairs there. Some of the buildings there look rather normal from the street at first glance, but the situation inside them is worse.

Town councilors, municipal officials, I hereby inform you that in Předlice there are buildings in disrepair that are not on that list and are at risk of immediate collapse. Those buildings are, without exaggeration, awful, I dare say they are in such dire shape that you can’t even imagine it. Those buildings are currently occupied by people, often by families with children, whose lives are in imminent danger, because the buildings might collapse on them at any time. I call on you to immediately start taking action on this issue, as per your legal obligations, as soon as possible. Yesterday was too late.

I have learned from the media that the town has filed criminal charges against me for spreading alarming news because I have published the information that there are buildings in Předlice whose technical states pose an acute danger to the health and lives of their occupants. That strikes me as absurd and ridiculous. If only our big shots would dedicate as much energy to inspecting the situation in Předlice as they do to preparing criminal charges.

We would like to draw your attention, for example, to building no. 4 on Řeháčkova street, which we consider to be the most dangerous, worst building in Předlice, and which is missing from the town’s list. With respect to that building we took several steps last week:  We filed a motion with the Regional Hygiene Administration, because we believe the hygienic situation in building no. 4 is dangerous to such a degree that there is an acute risk of an epidemic breaking out.

The public health authorities performed an inspection of building no. 4 yesterday and according to the information I have, they agreed with our reporting of the building as accurate, completely reasonable, and they consider the building to be completely uninhabitable. Anyone who steps inside the building also notices that some of the apartments there have collapsed onto the floors below them, while families with children continue to live in the apartments next door to those that have caved in. Reportedly the Regional Hygiene Administration will be informing the Building Works Authority and the Environmental Department today of its hygiene report.

We have also filed a report with the Police of the Czech Republic about building no. 4 and the facts testifying to the commission of a felony there. The police are investigating whether the owner has committed reckless endangerment.

We sent a polite letter to Deputy Mayor Kailová about what we found in building no. 4 and about the acute danger threatening its occupants and asked her to start resolving the situation post haste, since she is responsible for social affairs. The response was criminal charges against me.

What next? What can be done with the catastrophe that is Předlice? I believe it is evident that the situation there must be resolved immediately, and differently that the way it has been "addressed" to date. All of the measures, projects, and solutions implemented in Předlice have failed. The situation is deteriorating every day.

The so-called Working Group continues to meet about this problem, the group that managed the evacuation of building 106 and that is negotiating the fate of the Předlice ghetto in general. Neither the Romani people whose lives are involved nor the public as a whole has been informed as to the content of those negotiations or that they are even taking place. The Romani residents are not invited to these negotiations, the reports from the group’s sessions are kept from the public and from the community in Předlice, and the institutions leading these meetings are not publishing any information.

This system is unsustainable. It must change. Both the public and the Romani families whose lives are at risk have the right to know what the institutions paid from our taxes are meeting about. A discussion with experts and the public about the future of Předlice must be conducted. The proposed solutions must be adopted with the participation of those concerned or they will never work.

On Tuesday, 12 March, a big meeting will be held in the Předlice community. The Romani residents will discuss the future of their neighborhood. They all invite you to attend their meeting. They invite everyone – institutions, nonprofits, officials, police and politicians. They want to negotiate with you. If you won’t invite them to the town hall where you are conducting your negotiations, then they invite you to meet with them in the ghetto.

This is an enormous opportunity. I humbly ask you to accept this invitation. Without negotiating with the occupants of Předlice, we will never succeed in resolving this catastrophe.

Thank you for your attention.