News server 5plus2.cz reports that a court has sentenced 23 people for perpetrating last year’s anti-Romani violence at the Máj housing estate in České Budějovice. Not one person was charged with or convicted of racial motivation.
Several witnesses disagree with the verdicts. Amnesty International, which follows the situation with racial discrimination in the Czech Republic, has said it would also be in favor of stricter punishments for the perpetrators.
"There were 24 defendants on trial, most charged with committing violence against a public official and with rioting. The court put 22 of them on probation and sentenced only one person, a recidivist, to prison time without the possibility of parole. In one case the prosecution was conditionally halted. It involved an assault on a police horse," district state prosecutor Josef Richtr said.
According to several eyewitnesses, the organizers of and participants in the anti-Romani crusade got away with it too easily. The first official reports on the incident spoke of police officers injured with rocks and as many as 60 people charged.
"We are analyzing the video footage. There could be as many as a hundred [people charged]," South Bohemian Police spokesperson Jiří Matzner said at the end of last year.
The final phase of the trial did not address the injuries to the intervening police officers or racism at all. "[Law enforcement] evidently evaluated the chanting of ‘black swine’ as a reference to themselves," said Markus Pape, a German human rights activist who monitors extremism in the Czech Republic.
Pape was most probably referencing South Bohemian Police Commissioner Radomír Heřman, who at a press conference on 1 July 2013 in České Budějovice defended the fact that police officers never intervened against those who were chanting "black swine". At that event, Heřman claimed the shouting was not against Romani people, but against the police officers themselves.
From a video recording of the day’s events, however, it is obvious that the shouting was in reference to Romani people. It begins at the moment when a speaker addressing the demonstration names the streets down which they are about to march (a plan that was not announced to authorities as part of the demonstration).
When the speaker says the march will lead to the [Romani-occupied] Máj housing estate, the mob interrupts him, beginning the chant of "Black swine, black swine". The mob then chants "Let’s go get ’em, let’s go get ’em".
"During the demonstration on the square, the demonstrators chanted, among other things, the phrase ‘black swine’. That is the precise moment when the town hall, led by Mayor Thoma, should have dispersed the event, to say nothing of the unannounced march during which some demonstrators gave the Nazi salute and shouted other racist garbage. At that moment, the police should have dispersed the march or at least arrested suspects. Something is not in order with their failure to act. The police are here to assess whether the law is being upheld, not to give their blessing to lawbreaking through their own inaction. By doing so, the police directly legitimize racism. That’s a bad tactic," said František Kostlán, vice-chair of the Czech Helsinki Committee and a member of the ROMEA organization.
The judges were working within the framework of a particular section of the criminal code which permits punishments of between two and six years in prison without the possibility of parole. Many believe harsher punishments should have been handed down.
Amnesty International shares that belief. "We have reports from our observers that these assaults targeted Romani people," said Martina Pařízková, spokesperson for the organization.
