Czech Senate distances itself from former Senator's lies about "gypsies" in Switzerland

"Geneva used to be a friendly, open city, but several hundred Balkan gypsies were drawn there and now the town is completely paralyzed. The Swiss are afraid to let their children walk down the street. Gypsy children are robbing stores where security measures are weak like magpies," former Czech Senator Pavel Lebeda said this past summer in an interview with the Czech tabloid news server ParlamentníListy.cz.  

Echo24.cz reports that it has now been discovered that Lebeda’s remarks were untruthful and the Czech Senate has officially distanced itself from them. Lebeda was in Geneva last December as a member of a Senate delegation attending the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the city’s liberation from Napoleonic rule.

"A representative of the Czech commuinty, Mr Novotný, took us around Geneva," Lebeda said in the interview. This "Mr Novotný“ allegedly described to him how the city was "paralyzed" by an influx of Balkan Roma.

Czech Senator Tomáš Grulich (Civic Democratic Party – ODS), who led the Senate delegation to Switzerland, has distanced himself from Lebeda’s remarks. "I feel an obligation to state that we never met any Mr Novotný in Geneva, to say nothing of a representative of the Czech community in Switzerland accompanying the delegation. None of the representatives of the Czechs living in Switzerland knows any Mr Novotný. It is not, therefore, possible that anyone told us that Geneva is a city full of gypsies and that the Swiss are afraid to let their children walk down the street. We did not observe any such thing, and no one communicated any information of the sort to us," he said.

When Echo24.cz confronted Lebeda with these discrepancies between his story and Grulich’s, he provided an explanation: "Could he not have been named Novotný and I got the name wrong? He told me this at a meeting of the commission for our countrymen abroad this past spring. He’s an engineer, an older gentlemen, on the tall side, the head of the group."

During a second interview, Lebeda added a new name to his story: "I rebaptized the engineer in question. He’s not Novotný, his name is Havelka."

"I could never have told him anything of the sort because I do not believe anything of the sort. I do not recall that we had any sort of coherent discussion about that topic," Jaroslav Havelka, vice-chair of the Union of Czechs and Slovaks in Switzerland, told Echo24.CZ.

News server Romea.cz has previously caught Senator Lebeda in several lies. For example, in a previous interview, Lebeda claimed Romani families who enroll their children into high school receive CZK 1 000 monthly from the Czech Education Ministry and that the ROMEA organization provides them with CZK 21 000 annually.

Lebeda also said he had received statistics on Romani criminality from the Office of the Czech Government. All of the institutions he mentioned, however, protested his claims.

The same group of Czech politicians keeps repeating disinformation with the aim of harming Romani people, whether abroad or in the Czech Republic. They are former and serving legislators such as Jaroslav Doubrava, Vladimír Dryml, Pavel Lebeda and Tomio Okamura, most of whom receive room for their racist remarks on the webpages of the tabloid news server Parlamentní listy.