Czech Agency for Social Inclusion director: Roma shouldn't have to remind us they are here
The A2 biweekly magazine has published an extensive interview with the director of the Czech Government Agency for Social Inclusion. Martin Šimáček, about its work in excluded localities, opportunities for Romani emancipation, the participation of Romani people in integration, and efforts to influence social integration policy at the level of the Government. News server Romea.cz presents the interview in full translation below.
Q: The Agency for Social Inclusion works at local level through local partnerships, but it should also endeavor to influence the Government at the central level. How successful are you at these tasks?
A: Since 2010 we have succeeded in increasing our capacity for collaboration with towns and villages, and today we are able to work with 26 of them simultaneously. We don’t have the funds to work in more municipalities, but because the demand is high, we would like to increase that number in the future. We work in a place for a three-year period, and we have already accessed roughly one-third of the communities in the country grappling with social exclusion. During the past five years we have succeeded in building up a stable team of local consultants and a functional methodology. Today we know very well what to offer local governments, and they know what to expect from us. At the same time, we are rapidly learning where this collaboration fails and we are able to give municipalities very rapid feedback. Last year, we successfully concluded our three-year collaborations with nine municipalities and I have a very good feeling about all of them. The vast majority of mayors told us at the end of our collaboration that while they were not happy to see it end, they could see how social policy in their town had changed as well as other results, from the reconstruction of facilities for social services and youth recreation to the development of those social services and support for education, employment and housing.
Q: There are, however, cases where the collaboration has completely failed and was ended early. What kinds of reasons led to those particular outcomes?
A: In Holešov we had fundamental disagreements with the town leadership regarding the planned privatization of buildings in the town center and the construction of substitute accommodation for the residents in containers on the outskirts of town. After dozens of negotiations, it was clear we would never agree because the town leadership simply made the populist decision to expel Romani residents to the outskirts. The situation in Chomutov was more complicated. As I recall, that was mainly about us not reaching an understanding with then-Mayor Řápková. Back then the town leadership refused to adopt a strategic plan for social inclusion, a high-quality program that had been designed by several dozen stakeholders in a very strong local partnership. Today the mayor there is slowly changing the town’s approach and Chomutov is no longer an island of segregation as it was during Řápková’s time in office. She systematically pushed impoverished people and Romani people to the outskirts and further deteriorated their situations through repressive measures. In Duchcov we are seeing how terribly dangerous that kind of folk populism is, as it is represented by the local mayor and many other town councilors there. Duchcov is far from suffering any fundamental problem of Romani exclusion, as the community there is small and has a much higher integration potential than in other excluded localities. Romani people in Duchcov are ordinary residents of the town who work and live at a rather decent level. The whole situation there was exacerbated by the failure to handle a single case of violent crime perpetrated by members of a family which has long been troubled. Police should have acted more forcefully and rapidly and should have explained to the public how they were handling the case. The mayor there should also have attempted to calm the situation instead of attending a demonstration convened by local youths from the DSSS and publicly attacking social workers and the local nonprofit organization Květina (Flower). That was yet another reason the hatred among some members of the majority society has grown against all Romani people so unnecessarily. The fact that there is a very strong DSSS cell led by the party’s vice-chair, Jindřich Svoboda, also left its mark on Duchcov (he has called for the murder of Romani people on his Facebook profile, by the way). Be that as it may, we had ended our collaboration with Duchcov before any of that, because the town leadership rejected all 10 proposals we presented to the town council, including beefing up nursery schools, social services, and building a drop-in center for youth, even through the projects as designed would not have cost the town anything and could have been financed by the EU.
Q: Local collaboration presumes the municipality will request partnership on its own. I can imagine cases of places that are in a crisis situation but will never request collaboration precisely because of populist politics. Shouldn’t the methodology be changed in such cases?
A: The municipality must apply and complete a rather simple questionnaire. That is then discussed in the Monitoring Committee, our supervisory body that chooses municipalities for collaboration. However, we don’t just wait for applications to be filed – we actively reach out to local governments and speak with the mayors. For example, we know what a time bomb Tanvald is in terms of growing poverty, high unemployment, and the growing number of excluded localities there. The situation is escalating, petty crime is a daily occurrence, as are sociopathologies linked to concentrated poverty. These are things that the inhabitants of Tanvald are addressing day-to-day, and by now they are desperate. The town leadership doesn’t really know what to do, but at the same time they are unable to come before the citizens and say there is a big problem in Tanvald and that it must be addressed, whether in collaboration with our Agency or with anyone else. The councilors need to overcome that obstacle and start taking action.
Q: Are there many similar places in this country?
A: There are dozens of them. We are also in contact with municipalities with whom we do not directly collaborate. Often the citizens and the town leadership mistakenly believe that collaborating with us will bring some sort of special advantages only to the Romani residents, but our aid can be felt by everyone in a community. Social services, anti-debt counseling, employment opportunities – all of this is always available to everyone who needs it, irrespective of whether they are Romani or not.
Q: Previously you were called the Agency for Social Inclusion in Romani Localities, and it certainly still is the case that you work predominantly with Roma.
A: The Agency was primarily established to address the social exclusion of Romani people, and in the immediate future that will still be the biggest part of the content of its work, because Romani people are objectively the most impoverished minority in the Czech Republic and almost half of them live in excluded localities, which cannot be said about any other social group. Nevertheless, socially excluded localities are not just Romani, and at a minimum one-fourth of their inhabitants are members of the majority or of other minorities. In impoverished regions in particular we can speak in general of a decline among the most impoverished majority-society households into permanent unemployment and unemployability. We are primarily here to aid socially excluded Romani people, but we cannot ignore the social exclusion of other people.
Q: We’re talking about partial successes at local level, but we still haven’t gotten to your work at central level. Can successes even be spoken of there? Romani children, as far as I know, still comprise the majority of the "practical school" population, there is no law on social housing, and the gradual employability of these people is not on the horizon as a way out either.
A: You view these as partial successes, but I consider them significant. I don’t want this to sound like bragging, but with the exception of a few communities out of the 50 in which we have worked, the collaboration has gone well.
Q: I am also referencing the fact that in many places where you are needed you are not active at all, and it can be anticipated that the numbers of such places will increase.
A: We know of 150-180 municipalities grappling with the problem of exclusion and we have worked in about one-third of them…. Back to your original question, though. After five years of work, we have contributed many proposals for systemic changes to the ministries, changes that would have a positive impact in the more-impoverished regions, but I must admit that primarily during the administration of Petr Nečas we became rather a sort of defense force against bad ideas. We did not manage to prevent some of them, but in many cases we succeeded. Through negotiations we managed to get at least something corrected or taken away from many proposed measures that would obviously have had a negative impact on excluded localities. Our greatest success was evidently in stopping the segregationist proposal for so-called social housing that came from the Regional Development Ministry. Without us and other initiatives such as the Platform for Social Housing, that proposal would have gone through and we would have had a government-approved document today that de facto supported the development of even more residential hotels for the impoverished in this country. In the area of education, we have expected more from the Education Ministry. However, we must realize that five years ago the word "inclusion" was all but unknown to anyone at the ministry and that Jiří Pilař, a died-in-the-wool advocate of segregation in education, was director of a key department there. Today, precisely thanks to the Agency, inclusion is reaching mainstream education and I think we have taught the ministry, with the aid of many other stakeholders such as the Czech Expert Society for Inclusive Education, the Open Society Fund, and People in Need, to think differenlty about the education of handicapped children.
Q: Last year the Romani Integration Concept for 2020 was supposed to have been submitted. I presume you did a significant amount of work on that. Why isn’t it ready yet?
A: We’re not the ones who are supposed to design the Romani integration strategy. That is the responsibility of the Office of the Czech Government Inter-ministerial Commission for Roma Community Affairs, which is a component of the Human Rights Section (of which we are also a part). The Agency is responsible for the strategy of the fight against social exclusion. I don’t want it to seem like I’m washing my hands of it, naturally in the Roma strategy there is also a section concerning social exclusion and we are attempting with our colleagues from that office to reach agreement on its content. By the end of June everything should be ready and the material should be submitted to the Government.
Q: In the Open Society Fund’s Monitoring Report on the fulfillment of the Roma integration strategy in this country I found the statement that the main deficiency of that strategy is the fact that the Romani community has no chance to actively participate in the integration process. What is it like with Romani participation in that regard?
A: That is one of the most frequent admonishments I hear. To return to the local level once more, I must say that this admonishment is not justified in the case of the Agency. The moment a local partnership begins working somewhere, we also bring representatives of the local Romani minority into the game.
Q: You primarily negotiate with representatives of institutions and towns and secondarily with Roma from the local community, though. Romani people’s interests are also often represented by local NGOs without any Roma being present themselves.
A: The first person we go after is the mayor who has applied for collaboration and who is the main player to determine integration policy in a given place. The Agency is not a tool of emancipation or of social inclusion from below through civic initiatives, but a public institution for the support of social inclusion. From this it follows that our primary partner will always be the person who influences the form of social policy in a certain place, i.e., the town leadership and its various offices. At the same time, however, we are close to the nonprofit sector, which is another important component of a local partnership. Naturally we must aid in activating those concerned, those for whom there is a need to raise support. The more we succeed in involving them, the better. For example, in Kutná Hora we succeeded in drawing some members of the local Romani community into the activity of the local partnership, but it is true that not all of them can keep up with the tempo of negotiations and that they often get lost when an issue is one that requires too much expertise.
Q: They might also feel themselves to be in the minority at the negotiating table and might not want to show up for the next round. Isn’t it appropriate to come up with more areas of collaboration so Romani people might feel they are genuinely participating?
A: We are responding to that, on the one hand, by organizing meetings with local citizens where we find out what they believe is necessary to do, and also by doing our best to reach agreement with them on what they can do to make a contribution. We don’t discuss how a town’s housing policy should be set up with them, or what schools in their region should look like. We look for ways in which the citizens themselves can contribute to improvements. When we succeed in finding someone who is able to communicate the ideas of a local community to the local partnership, that’s brilliant, but it doesn’t succeed everywhere. The longer we have done this work, the more we have done our best to get local participation and common public meetings going. However, we must also work with the majority, who often feel threatened by the fact that we are are doing something there that has a positive impact on members of a minority in particular. We need to renew good relations between neighbors, to soften the rough edges between people, and often it’s like walking through a minefield, especially if the majority has a strong feeling that the minority is threatening them. In such an environment we must seek social reconciliation and the way forward toward a new social policy that will be functional for all impoverished people and for the Romani people in particular. We adapt our methods to the specific place, but that is not a simple task at all. When people say we don’t participate with locals, I don’t like it – we are often the first people to ever knock on their doors.
Q: You said the question of Romani emancipation is not part of your work. Can emancipation be separated from integration when we know that Romani people have been culturally vilified in this country as well? Who should aid Romani emancipation?
A: A total division between the two is actually impossible and would not make sense. Our main aim is not emancipatory activities, but on the other hand, we do our best to aid the Roma to, for example, raise the money to hold their own activities of an emancipatory nature. For example, in Kutná Hora, with our aid, an authentic civic association was created that is succeeding in such matters. The municipalities and the state should respond to the deteriorated positoin of the Romani minority without anyone having to remind them to do so. The Roma shouldn’t have to remind us they are here, the authorities should keep them in mind. I definitely do not deny that a component of the social exclusion of a significant part of the Romani minority is not just the bad position of Romani people in this society, but also the second-class status of Romani culture.
Q: When most of the money flows to social services, which are the main inclusion tool, the room for emancipation shrinks. The question is also raised of whether there are not cases of the big social service providers pushing out the small ones.
A: The big social service providers definitely do not think social work will resolve social exclusion. On the contrary, most of them will tell you that social work has many limitations and restrictions, and that without the support of other tools, it is essentially powerless. At the same time, however, social work is the basic pillar of all integration activities and cannot be ignored. Non-profit organizations today are ensuring that tens of thousands of Romani people in this country will not, if you will forgive the expression, fall even further to the bottom of the barrel, that they have at least a basic buttress in the form of a social worker. Its all the same whether that social worker is a gadjo or a Rom – what is important is that he or she be a professional. These attacks on the big nonprofits are extremely repugnant to me, because they are attempts to destroy what little these people in material distress, in social exclusion – and Romani people especially – have available to them. In any event, the big nonprofits decidedly should not stamp out the smaller ones. At the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry they are beginning to realize this. I now consider that ministry to be a much better donor than it previously was. The money is making it to the smaller nonprofits too, which is also a task of the Agency. Let’s not, however, be under the illusion that a small or a specifically Romani nonprofit automatically means success. I also know self-seekers who just exploit the fact that they are Romani and do not do much to aid other Romani people in the Czech Republic.
Q: Do resources for Romani emancipation exist here?
A: Certainly they do, but I must say they are really decreasing. The Culture Ministry has had to cut back a bit and the Education Ministry has too, so we are only receiving several dozens of millions of Czech crowns annually, which is really not enough given the size of the Romani minority in the Czech Republic.
Q: Can you give us a specific successful example of the Agency’s community work besides Kutná Hora?
A: Right now I am very glad about Kadaň, where the status of building manager has just been instituted, and the people who do this are often Romani. There are regular meetings among the tenants of apartment buildings there, and most of the stakeholders attend them to discuss housing issues in the building as well as related activities such as children’s recreation or the running of the community center that was successfully built there. Some of those people have been hired as crime prevention assistants. I attended several of those meetings and it’s a very interesting experience that proves that sometimes there is a need for people to first argue with one another to find the leaders among them in a natural way. Those leaders are in the position of building managers now. They are not maintenance workers, they are people who are able to represent the stakeholders in the building. In addition, a street football league has been created, for example, within which teams from the locality in Prunéřov play, as well as teams from other places and schools in Kadaň. This is a neighborhood community in the real sense of the term.
Q: In the context of the multiplying marches by right-wing extremists, the question is often raised as to what the inhabitants of excluded localities should be recommended to do during those events. What is the opinion of the Agency on that matter? Should people, in your opinion, leave town, should they shut themselves up at home with their children, or should they make it clear that they too are at home on the streets the neo-Nazis are usurping for themselves?
A: As far as those who are potentially in danger are concerned, local nonprofits often negotiate these events with them and it would be our turn to do so only if no NGOs were around. I advocate the Roma turning their backs on the Nazis in those situations.
Q: Does that mean shutting themselves up at home, somewhat becoming hostages in their own homes?
A: It’s often difficult to do, especially if the neo-Nazis are marching beneath their windows, but they should ignore them and ensure their personal safety. The impact of such a march can be especially terrible for children. How are they supposed to go to school the next day? What will remain in their memory if they see their father rolled over by a neo-Nazi march or a police cordon? They should not be in such a situation, they shouldn’t be there at all.
Q: For children that’s understandable, but the question is whether solving this by running away doesn’t deny the Roma their dignity, because they cannot behave as they would under normal circumstances.
A: We challenge municipalities – and we provide them with a very intensive service in this regard – to do their best to ban such marches as long as there are legal reasons to do so. For example, if a march is scheduled to head into an excluded locality and it can be presumed that its primary purpose is an attack by the demonstrators on the Romani minority, then it should be banned. We help municipalities who show an interest in analyzing the announcements of assemblies, we are on the scene prior to the assemblies and during them, and we assist the authorized local bureaucrat with analyzing the situation so the assembly can be dissolved once underway if need be.
Q: There is also the option of a counter-demonstration, which could take place elsewhere in town to give people a certain feeling of active resistance or dignity, the impression that they are standing up to what’s happening.
A: That’s a different case. We have an experience with that from Přerov, where a counter-action took place primarily thanks to the coordination of the Agency, local Roma, the mayor, People in Need, the police, and the Regional Romani Coordinator – we all got together and came up with an appropriate counter-action. Maybe you can’t succeed in preventing the march, but you can hold a concert one street over where local politicians speak and where everyone loudly condemns the neo-Nazis. Then people really feel the municipality is on their side and they don’t have to stay home. That’s the best that can happen, but it doesn’t succeed everywhere.
Q: What is the Agency’s opinion of repressive zero tolerance programs like the one underway in Litvínov?
A: I see a great misfortune in the fact that all of the practices in Litvínov are now being called a "zero tolerance" program. That town is famous for the local police and OSPOD [the child welfare authorities] performing very strict audits of the population. At the same time, in addition to those measures, many useful programs have been created there – anti-debt counseling, children’s recreational activities, the expansion of social services, and transitional housing programs. All of these were components of a package that was called a "zero tolerance" program and included both aid and prevention elements in addition to repressive elements. I agree with some of the OSPOD audits of households, in particular where children’s interests are at stake, because I know those audits are also augmented by aid and support. However, I decidedly disagreed – both in public and in negotiations with the mayor – with what we all saw in the video footage online a year ago, where an OSPOD employee, assisted by municipal police, broke into an apartment, threatened the people there, and then vanished. That was very bad practice and we discussed it with the social welfare department and the town leadership. From Litvínov, the "zero tolerance" idea is now spreading to other towns, but only in this reduced notion of repressive auditing measures, as we saw last summer in Duchcov. That’s a problem. It is not possible, for example, for the social welfare department to keep a special database of households in an excluded locality and to constantly update the database with groundless, repeated audits of all the apartments in that locality. As part of preventing this mechanical dissemination of "zero tolerance", we are currently undertaking research which will demonstrate during the next six months how these specific "zero tolerance" programs end up, what their impacts are on the atmosphere and on the people in these towns.
