Miroslav Brož of the civic association Konexe has written an open letter to the People in Need (Člověk v tísni) public benefit corporation regarding the way in which the Romani minority is being integrated and the situation in the Předlice quarter of Ústí nad Labem. News server Romea.cz is publishing the letter in full translation below.
Dear Friends,
I am writing you this letter because I want to contribute toward clarifying my opinions and also to ameliorating or eliminating some of the misunderstandings and myths that are going around about the engagement of the Konexe civic association in the Předlice scandal. It is total nonsense to describe Konexe’s assistance to the residents of Předlice as somehow a personal vendetta of mine against the People in Need (PIN) organization.
I do not deny that the activities of PIN and the activities of Konexe in Předlice currently conflict with one another. There is an enormous antagonism right now between our solutions for this situation and our visions. This is not a personal conflict at all, but an ideological one.
I have the advantage of having worked for PIN four years ago. This means I know your ideological basis and philosophy, and I think I can view the Předlice scandal and the entire phenomenon of excluded localities and social exclusion through your eyes and your perspective. I am trying to offer you a rather different perspective. Of course, to do so I have to start from a broader viewpoint.
Last year we at Konexe succeeded in responding to the events in the Šluknov foothills by putting together a strong multidisciplinary team of volunteers to provide psychosocial aid to Romani residents of the residential hotels who had become the target of hate marches in Šluknov district and elsewhere. One outgrowth of this team was the creation of a think tank which began to meet regularly to analyze and debate the situation of poor Romani communities.
Here is a summary of the most essential, and also the most obvious, theses we have come to:
- The situation of excluded Romani communities in the Czech Republic has continually deteriorated for the last 20 years.
- The worst thing is that this deterioration continues to accelerate.
- This deterioration is happening despite the applied policies (and programs) of social integration as we know them in the Czech Republic.
Current integration policies, and the familiar instruments and measures they use (i.e., known variables such as assigning a social worker to each family, tutoring the children, arranging some inferior community service work for the parents) are not enough to slow the deterioration of the situation in excluded Romani communities, to say nothing of improving it.
That much is purely empirical. Why is the current so-called social integration policy (and its instruments) failing? Why doesn’t it work despite all of the drive, effort, and financial means available to the policy implementers?
The reason is that this so-called social integration policy, as we know it in the Czech Republic, is extremely paternalistic. It is built on paternalism and stands on paternalism. That is why it can’t work.
One manifestation of this paternalism is, first and foremost, that there is absolutely no involvement of the members and representatives of poor Romani communities in the planning and implementation of this so-called social integration policy or in the design of its instruments. The opinions, priorities and stances of the communities and people who are meant to be the recipients of this policy’s aid are not involved in it in any way. Projects designed to aid the poor are not created such that someone consults their content with people from the impoverished community for which the projects are designed. They are created at a project team meeting in a far-off office in Prague. This means we are expecting impoverished Romani communities to actively join the process of integration and actively cooperate with it, even when we never speak with them about it at all.
Impoverished Romani people are taken as the object of integration, as "clients", not as the equal and most important partners for discussion at all levels. Until that aspect of the situation is transformed, there is no chance of achieving positive change.
The most essential thing is that the problems of impoverished Romani communities will never be resolved by college-educated gadje providing them social services. Activation of their own internal resources and the potential of their community members will resolve their problems, however.
An enormous number (thousands and thousands) of very clever, intelligent people live in socially excluded localities. They may not have formal educations, but they have great capabilities and experiences, a deep knowledge of the issues, and an enormous potential "to do something". Members of this particular layer of the population in the localities usually do not become clients of the nonprofits, and they may, therefore, be "invisible" to you.
For the time being, no one has tried to "work" with these people, to awaken their potential, to contribute toward developing their own possibilities. It is these people, not majority-society institutions, who will be the movers of change and the vehicles for solutions. The reality in the impoverished ghettos of the Czech Republic has already reached such a state that something like a "civil society of the socially excluded" has started to form and these people are now starting to activate themselves.
There is a need to achieve systemic changes that would facilitate these people joining in the design and planning of social policy measures and specific projects so that their voices can be heard – and mainly, so their ideas can be taken on board. Organizations from the majority part of society often love to chant slogans about "civil society". Now these organizations can choose whether they want to continue approaching Romani people as if they were mentally incompetent children (and thereby smother to death the manifestations of this new civil society among them), or whether they take their own ideas about civil society seriously enough to support these elements of civil society among impoverished people and Romani people as well.
Some theses about Předlice:
The situation in Předlice can confidently be called a humanitarian catastrophe, and the building on Beneše Lounského street is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. There are buildings in Předlice in much worse shape and the people living in them are risking their lives in so doing.
Our activists have spent a great deal of time in Předlice in recent days and weeks. We have determined that some of the buildings that look impressively good from the outside, with new facades or windows, are still catastrophic inside. Scrap metal collectors are running amok in the unoccupied apartments and common areas of these buildings. Such was the case of the building that recently collapsed on its occupants. Other buildings are horrible both inside and out, but either no one knows about them or no one wants to address them.
The critical situation in Předlice today did not develop from one day to the next. It has arisen over a longer period, gradually escalating. All of the institutions who watched it escalate and did nothing are to blame, primarily the town, which has the legal obligation to heed the protection of its citizens’ health and lives and to uphold the law on its territory. The owners of the buildings in Předlice have not conformed to building codes for years, nor are the generally binding hygienic norms upheld there.
People in Need, which has worked in the ghetto without ever trying to draw attention to the situation in Předlice, has also failed. PIN never sounded the alarm, never tried to publicize the deteriorating situation in the ghetto, and never put any pressure on the town to start addressing the situation, because PIN is more loyal to its allies in the town hall than it is to the impoverished residents of Předlice.
Political responsibility for the Předlice ghetto lies with Deputy Mayor Zuzana Kailová (Czech Social Democratic Party – ČSSD), who is responsible for social welfare but is completely passive and professionally incapable of addressing this issue. Kailová is also the main political ally of PIN at the town hall. This is why it is taboo at PIN to publicly criticize her or her (in)activity.
The town hall knows very well that the situation in Předlice is the product of its own inactivity and of the poorly-conducted privatization of the quarter. Until a building collapsed, crushing its occupants, the situation in Předlice suited most of those involved (see my previous article at http://www.romea.cz/en/features-and-commentary/analyses/czech-republic-the-fatal-catastrophe-of-the-predlice-ghetto). This is why they are now doing their best to sweep the entire Předlice scandal under the carpet, or at least to reduce media coverage of it down to the scandal of a single building on Beneše Lounského street (see the translation of the PIN press release issued this past weekend at http://www.romea.cz/en/news/czech/czech-ngo-says-tenants-must-leave-condemned-building).
Because of the inaction and passivity of all who were responsible, the tragedy of a building in Předlice collapsing and burying its occupants came to pass. One woman died as a result. It was not the first such incident – other apartment buildings had collapsed in Předlice before then and it was a miracle that no injuries occurred during those incidents. No one responsible for these matters has ever responded to them adequately.
Only 2 – 3 % of the Předlice occupants are the clients of nonprofits, PIN included. Little is known about the life and needs of the rest of the people. No one asks them their opinions or communicates with them about the situation there.
It is an enormous mistake to convene any kind of negotiations on addressing the situation in Předlice without inviting the residents to participate or without letting them in when they show up. The situation concerns them most of all. They are the ones for whom a solution is being sought, and they have much better information about the situation there than do the other actors who are usually invited to negotiate. Solutions which are not the result of a consensus between the Předlice community and the majority-society institutions will never work. You must stop negotiating about Romani people without them.
All of the negotiations about Předlice are being conducted behind the scenes is a very non-transparent way. There is a list of buildings which a structural engineer has labeled as being in poor condition, but no one residing in Předlice has seen it. People there are now living in fear and uncertainty as to whether their building is on that list.
The residents of Předlice know that on 23 October there was a meeting of the so-called Mayoral Action Group (attended by the Czech Government Agency for Social Inclusion and PIN) to negotiate the situation in Předlice. Residents were not invited to that meeting even though they were greatly interested in attending it. Many people, not just Předlice residents, would like to read the minutes of that meeting in order to learn who said what there, what precisely was negotiated, what proposals for solutions were made by whom. The real minutes are a secret. We sent an official request to the town hall for them, but the "minutes" their bureaucrats sent us look like an unsuccessful joke, as no information can be gleaned from them at all.
Moving the tenants of Předlice into residential hotels is no solution
Residential hotels would be the worst solution for the evicted residents of the quarter right now. News server iDNES.cz has just reported that tensions are rising in town over such facilities. PIN, do you agree? What are you doing to prevent this?
Here’s a quote from the town’s recent press release: "…social workers are helping families attend to documents and contact the owners of other residential hotels." PIN, do you really want to become a supplier of people to the residential hotels? Hasn’t enough been reported about the character of these businesses and the results they produce? The town has several dozen apartments of its own available, but since they are "nice", officials find it unthinkable to assign their leases to Romani families from Předlice.
What our work should look like
What would have to happen for us to proceed in a coordinated way, together, on this Předlice scandal? How can we combine forces to aid the residents who really need help?
Evicting the residents into gyms or residential hotels is no "solution". We should criticize this "solution" together and oppose it.
PIN should start behaving as its program documents instruct it to, i.e., it should start defending the interests of the residents of the socially excluded locality in Předlice, not the interests of the town hall. This could be achieved by, for example, taking the Předlice agenda at PIN out of the hands of staff who have strong personal ties to the politicians responsible for the state of affairs in that neighborhood.
Our joint efforts should aim at drawing attention to the situation in Předlice and moving it to the center of public interest. We would push to make it the center of interest for the local politicians responsible by having the citizens pressure them to resolve the situation, not by sweeping it under the carpet and letting the situation continue to deteriorate.
Negotiations between all parties on the fate of Předlice would include and involve residents. They would receive the opportunity to directly express their views of the proposed solutions, to comment on them, to prompt modifications of them, and to propose their own solutions.
Negotiations between all parties on the fate of Předlice would be transparent, not closed or held behind the scenes. Minutes would be taken of the negotiations and made available to the citizens. First the minutes of the negotiations held on 23 October and the structural engineer’s list of buildings identified as hazardous would be published. This would significantly contribute toward calming the fear and uncertainty prevailing among ghetto residents. Information about Předlice is of interest not only to ghetto residents, but also to other engaged residents of the town, such as people living near the residential hotels into which the Předlice residents might be evicted.
The website of Konexe is at http://oskonexe.wordpress.com
The Facebook page of Konexe is at https://www.facebook.com/Konexe
