Czech Roma refuse to meet with extremist candidate

Ladislav Bílý, chair of the Roma Civic Association in Karlovy Vary, refused to meet today with Ladislav Paštéka, the leading candidate of the Public Affairs party (Věcí veřejné – VV) in Chodov, Sokolov district. Prior to joining VV, Paštéka was a member of the ultra-right National Party (Národní strana – NS), which fell apart last December, and a member of its “protection corps”, called the “National Guard” (Národní garda – NG).

After the daily Právo reported on Paštéka’s former NS membership, Public Affairs issued a press release claiming he is not an extremist. According to VV, Paštéka did not join the National Party until 2009, the same year it fell apart. “According to my information, Ladislav Paštéka is even preparing to meet with representatives of the Roma community,” said VV chair and Czech Interior Minister Radek John. Paštéka subsequently telephoned Ladislav Bílý, chair of the Roma Civic Association in Karlovy Vary, wanting to meet. “I refused – he’s no partner of ours. He was a member of the National Party and especially the National Guard, which agitated against the Roma here for a long time and in a particularly ugly way. It’s horrifying that something like this is even possible. This is a prime example of how the Public Affairs party selects its candidates,” Bílý told news server Romea.cz.

“I do not understand how the Public Affairs party could run a person as their top candidate who was recently a member of the extremist National Party. In essence that party was manifestly against anyone who disagreed with it, not just the Roma. As party chair and as Interior Minister, Radek John should not be pleading such a person’s case, but should take swift action against his candidacy,” said Ladislav Baláž of the organization EUROPE ROMA CZ. Because of his anti-racist activities during the 1990s, Baláž and his family were persecuted and threatened by neo-Nazis and other racists, mainly skinheads.

Until its demise the National Party made numerous verbal assaults on the Roma. It published defamatory articles and jeers against the Roma on its website, disrupted a commemoration at the site of the former concentration camp for Roma at Lety, and provocatively installed its own “memorial” to the concentration camp guards in that same town. The party was perhaps best known for a study it published and promoted as part of its program, entitled “The Final Solution to the Gypsy Question”. The title of the study is a clear reference to what the Nazis during the Second World War called the “final solution to the Jewish question” and then put into practice. The author of the study, Jiří Gaudin, who first presented it at the illegally installed National Party “memorial” at Lety, has since been sentenced for inciting hatred against the Roma by proposing the Czech Republic follow the Nazi model and forcibly deport all Roma to India.

Paštéka was very active in the National Party. According to available information he was not just a member, but participated in trainings of the National Guard, a partially armed (with knives) corps modeled after the fascist National Guard in Hungary or the Communist Party’s People’s Militia in pre-1989 Czechoslovakia. He is also alleged to have been a contributor to or editor of an internet radio station operated by the National Party.

Public Affairs party chair and Interior Minister Radek John has no problem with Paštéka’s membership. “Everyone has the right to mature with the exception of the Communists – there we are strict,” John said. The VV articles of incorporation do not permit anyone to join who has previously been a Communist Party member; while VV is strict about members’ communist pasts, the same does not apply to the National Party. “I’d quote former PM Miloš Zeman here: ‘Only an idiot never changes his opinions,’ ” John said (Zeman borrowed the saying from Winston Churchill). “Everyone has the right to decide his path leads other than to the Workers’ Party.” John does not intend to cross Paštéka off the candidate list or change VV guidelines on the previous political affiliations of its members.