The
Czech Republic is one of the East European countries without a notable extremist
presence. In the 1998 elections the extreme-right Sdruzeni pro
republiku-Republikanska strana Ceskoslovenska lost their seats in parliament
and have since joined other extremist parties on the fringes of Czech politics.
President Vaclav Havel continues to be a major force for the promotion of human
rights in the country, while the new social democratic government also takes a
far more proactive anti-racist stand than its predecessors.
Demographic data
(results from the 2001 census not yet available)
Total
population: 10.3 million (provisional 2001 census figure)
Ethnic
and national groups (provisional 2001 census figures, 1991 census figures in
brackets): Czech 90 per cent (81.2), Moravian 3.6 per cent (13.2), Slovak
1.8 per cent (3.1), Polish 0.5 per cent (0.6), German 0.4 per cent (0.5),
Silesian 0.1 per cent (0.4), Romanies 0.1 per cent (0.3), other 3.4 per
cent (0.5)
Jewish
population: 3,000 (roughly 1,300 in Prague)
Religion:
atheist 39.8 per cent, Roman Catholic 39.2 per cent, Protestant 4.6 per cent,
Orthodox 3 per cent, other 13.4 per cent (Islam is not officially recognized as
religion)
Political data
Political
system: bicameral parliamentary democracy
Head of state: President Vaclav Havel, now serving his second five-year term after being elected by parliament in February 1998
Government: following
the June 2002 parliamentary elections, in which the Ceska strana socialne
demokraticka (CSSD, Czech
Social Democratic Party)
won 35 per cent of the vote, the CSSD formed a government in coalition with the
Krestansko demokraticka unie-Ceska strana lidova (KDU-CSL,
Christian Democratic
Union–Czechoslovak People’s Party)
and Unie svobody-Demokraticka unie (US–DEU, Freedom Union–Democratic Union)
under Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla.
Parliamentary elections: The most recent Senate elections were held in November 2002, when 26 of the 81 seats were contested. The current composition of the Senate is:
Obcanska demokraticka strana (ODS, Civic Democratic Party) 26 seats
KDU–CSL
14 seats
CSSD
11 seats
US–DEU
9 seats
Civic
Democratic Alliance (ODA)
5 seats
Communist
Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM)
3 seats
Independents
or non-parliamentary parties
13 seats
The results of the June 2002 election of the 200 members of the Chamber of Deputies were as follows:
CSSD
35 per cent
(70 seats)
ODS
27 per cent
(58 seats)
KSCM
20.5 per cent (41 seats)
KDU–CSL,
US–DEU
15.5 per cent
(31 seats)
Next elections:
June 2006 (Chamber of Deputies), November 2004 (Senate and regional elections),
January 2003 (presidential elections)
Economic data
These figures are taken from the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
GDP: US$55 billion (1999), US$51.4 billion (2000), US$56.7 billion (2001)
GDP growth rate: 2.5 per cent (2000), 3.6 (2001)
Inflation:
8.2 per cent (June 1998), 3.8 per cent (2000),
4.2
per cent (2001)
Unemployment: 8.8 per cent (1999), 8.9 per cent
(2000), 8.2 per cent (2001)
The
1,000 years of Jewish history in Bohemia and Moravia have witnessed periods of
both prosperity and persecution. The flourishing Jewish community under
Czechoslovak President Tomas Masaryk (1918–35), which numbered 118,000, was
almost completely annihilated in the Holocaust. In 1952 the show trials,
orchestrated by Moscow, of Rudolf Slansky and other top Communist officials,
several of them of Jewish extraction, displayed clear antisemitic signs. Most
survivors of the Holocaust left the country either after the Second World War or
after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Since the collapse of the
Soviet regime and the division of the country into two sovereign republics, the
rights of the small Czech Jewish population have been fully respected by the
authorities.
Romany
detention camps in the Czech Republic
In
1939 the Czech protectorate (under Nazi occupation) issued an edict ordering all
Romanies to settle. Anyone not complying would be sent to one of the two Romany
labour camps, Lety u Pisku in southern Bohemia or Hodonin u Kunstatu in Moravia.
In 1942 greater police powers to detain ‘criminals’ were introduced,
including detention in Lety and Hodonin as well as other Czech camps and
deportation to Auschwitz, Treblinka or elsewhere. According to the census of
1942, more than 6,500 Romanies had been rounded up and sent to camps. The
majority remained free until further edicts of 1942–3 were issued by the Reich
Ministry of the Interior, after which all of the Czech Romanies were deported.
The files of the gypsy camp at Auschwitz record the names of some 4,500 Czech
Romanies, of which only a small proportion survived. After the war, 583 Romany
men and women returned to their homes in the Czech lands.
The
Lety camp was intended for ‘anti-social’ Romanies from Bohemia, and all of
its prisoners either died in the camp or were transported to Auschwitz or
elsewhere. Those interned in the Hodonin camp intended for Moravian Romanies met
with a similar fate. It is estimated that more than half of the Romany
population in the Czech lands was eradicated in both of these camps. Lety and
Hodonin were administered by the protectorate authorities and managed solely by
Czech personnel, none of whom were charged with war crimes after 1945, apart
from Lety’s camp director Josef Janovsky who was acquitted in a 1945–8
trial.
In
the 1970s the Communist Czech government built a pig farm on the site of the
Lety camp, which was sold to a private owner in 1994. In 1995 President Vaclav
Havel unveiled a memorial to the camp’s victims at the site, despite the fact
that the farm was still in operation. In December 1998, an open letter signed by
a number of well-known cultural and spiritual figures, both within the Czech
Republic and abroad, was presented to the Czech government requesting the
removal of the pig farm and the appropriate memorialization of the site. In 1999
Czech Human Rights Commissioner Peter Uhl’s reiteration of this proposal was
rejected by the government. Despite the ongoing campaign, the pig farm continues
to be in operation, with little indication that the funds necessary to purchase
the site will be forthcoming.
The
memorial at Lety nonetheless is the focus of commemorations of the Romany
victims of the Holocaust in the Czech Republic. Scores of activists gathered at
the Lety memorial in May 2000, in an act of remembrance. Over 100 Romanies
gathered there to mark International Roma Day (8 April) in 2001.
Restitution
In
November 1999 the Czech government officially asked the Russian government to
return 396 kilogrammes of gold originally belonging to Czech Jews. The gold was
first confiscated from Jews during the Nazi occupation and later taken from the
national bank by the Red Army after the war. Russia did not formally respond,
though a spokesman for the Russian foreign ministry said the letter had offered
no proof for the claim and that Russia would not enter into negotiations on the
subject. Czech historians working on the case said they had unambiguous and
irrefutable proof that the gold belonged to Jewish Holocaust victims.
In
January 2000 the Czech government drafted a law on the restitution of Jewish
property confiscated during the Second World War, which was later approved by
both chambers. The law applies to land and property confiscated from individuals
that was not returned because of the Communist takeover in 1948. The government
also allocated 300 million Czech crowns (Kc) to compensate owners for property
that cannot be returned because the state no longer owns it or the property no
longer exists. The first transfer of property formerly owned by Jews to the
Czech Jewish community was approved in August 2001; it included twelve plots of
land and one building. The Jewish community compiled a list of 1,450 properties
to which it lays claim but, according to officials, the state will not be able
to return more than 50–100 properties.
War
crimes
In June 2000 German authorities in Munich detained Anton Malloth (88), who commanded an SS unit at Theresienstadt in northern Bohemia. He was sentenced to death in absentia by a Czech court in 1948, but the sentence was later quashed. His arrest was due to new testimony, after Germany had halted the prosecution for lack of sufficient evidence.
Minorities
in the Czech Republic
Judging
from both the 1991 census figures on
‘nationality’ and the provisional 2001 census
figures, almost everyone living in the Czech Republic (90 per cent in 2001)
considers him/herself to be Czech. The number of those who identified themselves
as ‘Moravian’, for example, decreased dramatically between 1991 (13.2 per
cent) and 2001 (3.6 per cent).
Most
of the national minorities in the Czech Republic are from Eastern or Central
European states or regions. Although there are also small but sizeable
communities of Greeks, Vietnamese and Chinese. The Greek community was
apparently formed from those who fled to Communist Czechoslovakia the after the
left was defeated in the post-war Greek civil war. The Vietnamese community also
dates from the Communist era when young Vietnamese emigrated to Czechoslovakia
to work in factories and hospitals as support staff. In 2000 there were an
estimated 25,000 Vietnamese with a permanent or long-term residence permit
living in the Czech Republic.
Since
the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1993, the ethnic Slovaks in the Czech Republic
(184,000 identified themselves as ‘Slovakian’ in the 2001 census but the
actual number is estimated at between 315,000 and 500,000) have had to adapt to
their new situation as a minority community. They have established political and
cultural organizations, and relations with the Czech majority and the government
are generally good.
At
present, after ethnic Slovaks, Romanies constitute the largest minority in the
Czech Republic. In the 2001 census, only 11,716 chose to declare their
nationality as Romany, although the estimated number of Romanies in the country
is between 165,000 and 330,000. According to Markus Pape of the European
Roma Rights Center: ‘Many Roma do not want to get registered as being
members of the Roma community. A lot of them are afraid to say so, because they
are afraid of problems with the state administration and also with neo-Nazis who
could find out.’ In the 1991 census, three times as many (32,903) declared
themselves as Romany. Although Romanies live throughout the country, they are
mainly concentrated in the industrial towns of northern Bohemia.
The
existence of Romanies in what is now the Czech Republic was first recorded in
the late fourteenth century, and they became almost immediately the object of
persecution, originally on religious grounds. This culminated in the 1697 decree
that placed Romanies outside the law, making their shooting, hanging, drowning
or killing legal. While attempts to assimilate Romanies by means of education
and christianization were to some degree successful throughout the eighteenth
century, particularly in Moravia, by the end of the nineteenth century, the
situation of this semi-nomadic community of travelling craftsmen and musicians
had been considerably worsened by the advance of industrialization and
urbanization. The response on the part of the authorities was the so-called Law
on Wandering Gypsies (1927) which implemented draconian restrictions on the
Romany way of life. But the greatest tragedy was to come after 1939, when
Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Nazis and anti-Romany measures ultimately
meant that, by the end of the war, almost the entire Czech Romany population had
either been murdered in the Holocaust or
deported.
After
the war some surviving Romanies returned to Czechoslavia where they were joined
by Romanies migrating from other Eastern Euorpean countries. In the post-war
Communist period, the authorities—whose goal in general was the creation of a
nationally homogeneous population by means of the assimilation of minority
groups—implemented measures to compel Romanies to settle and take jobs, as
well as to provide social security for impoverished members of the community.
After the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989, on the one hand, the
Romanies acquired for the first time the status of a national minority as well
as the possibility of parliamentary representation but, on the other, suffered
from the loss of the social safety net, from rising rates of unemployment and an
increase in acts of anti-Romany violence. The treatment of Romanies in the Czech
Republic has been the subject of increasing criticism from abroad, particularly
in late 1997 when tens of thousands of Czech Romanies applied for asylum in
other countries, particularly in the United Kingdom, France and Canada.
Romanies
today suffer disproportionately from poverty, unemployment, inter-ethnic
violence, discrimination, illiteracy and disease. Their unemployment rates are
high—a report by the governmental Commission for Human Rights put the
unemployment rate among Romanies in 1999 at 80 per cent—and they face physical
threats and deeply ingrained popular prejudice, as is repeatedly demonstrated by
public opinion polls. It is estimated that less than 2 per cent of
Romanies receive a regular academic education, while some 75 per cent of Romany
children, on the basis of standardized tests that make no allowances for ethnic
or language differences, attend special schools for the mentally retarded. In
April 2000, after representations made to the Czech constitutional court
questioning the constitutionality of this educational system were rejected in
November 1999, the European Roma
Rights Center, on behalf of eighteen Romany children from the town of
Ostrava, filed an application with the European Court of Human Rights alleging
‘systematic racial segregation and discrimination in Czech schools’. In
November 2001 the government debated proposals aimed at redressing these
problems and eliminating discrimination against Romany children in schools.
Efforts
by foundations and individuals in the education and health fields to improve
Romany living conditions, especially the condition of children, have had only
minimal impact. There is a Czech-language programme for Romanies on state television
and another on state radio. There are various publications for Romanies, of
which all but one are state-supported. Romany leaders have had limited success
thus far in organizing their local communities.
In 1999 the government approved the document ‘Concept for Integration of the Romany Community’. The document outlines measures for eliminating discrimination and improving the social position of Romanies. Pavel Rychetsky, deputy premier in charge of legislation, told journalists that the government had decided against setting up a ‘quota system’ for Romany employees in the civil service but would offer advantages to companies in which Romanies or members of other socially disadvantaged groups accounted for more than 60 per cent of the work force.
In
March 2000 the Council of Europe’s Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI)
said that ‘discrimination against members of the Romany community in all
spheres of social life is . . . alarming’.
A
few weeks later, in April 2000, Amnesty
International said that Czech Romanies continue to be at risk of racist
attack and that law enforcement authorities do not provide them with adequate
protection. Its report on the human rights situation in the Czech Republic
during the second half of 1999 noted that Czech police often do not intervene to
protect Romany citizens from violent attacks and that the courts have a tendency
to hand down light sentences against their convicted attackers. In its 2000
report, Amnesty International also reported allegations that the authorities
fail to investigate effectively some incidents involving racist violence against
Romanies.
In
August 2000 the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD)
formally adopted its report and recommendations in regard to racial bias in the
Czech Republic. The report expressed concern ‘that the Roma continued to be
subjected to discrimination and at the ineffective implementation of existing
legislation to prosecute the perpetrators of incitement of racial hatred and
support to racist movements’. The CERD rapporteur said that the
‘segregation’ of the Romany community in the Czech Republic amounts to ‘a
mini-apartheid’. The recommendations proposed that ‘effective measures be
taken to eradicate promptly practices of racial segregation, including the
placement of a disproportionate number of Romany children in special schools’.
Prague-based human rights groups the Czech
Helsinki Committee and the Movement for Civic Solidarity and Tolerance
(HOST) welcomed the statement. In February 2001 the US State Department’s annual
report on human rights criticized the Czech Republic for occasional police
violence and discrimination against Romanies as well as for the discrimination
they face in education, employment and social and health care. The Czech
government’s (outgoing) human rights commissioner, Petr Uhl, said that the
report was objective, but that the situation of Romanies is improving.
In
October 2001 the annual report of the Open Society Institute (OSI)
stated that the situation of Czech Romanies had not, despite efforts, improved
over the last year. The report said discrimination is not legally outlawed in
the Czech Republic and relevant regulations against discrimination, though
existing, are not consistently applied. The OSI also claimed that despite the
government campaign in support of tolerance, displays of racism have become more
frequent over the last year, and the number of racist organizations has grown.
It further states that Czech courts are often reluctant to convict perpetrators
of anti-Romany violence within the legal provisions against racism.
In
May 2002 a report was published
by the Czech Helsinki Committee on human rights in the Czech Republic in 2001.
It called governmental efforts to improve the living conditions in Romany
communities a failure, and claimed that the total number of 70,000 Romanies who
had left the country emphasized the point. It also criticized the authorities
for improperly dealing with the increasing number of applications by
asylum-seekers.
The
Czech Republic provides first asylum (the granting of temporary asylum for
refugees hoping to relocate in a third country) and co-operates with the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
and other humanitarian organizations in assisting refugees. The number of
refugees to the Czech Republic has risen steadily since 1989. In 1990, 1,600
people applied for asylum, a number that had grown to 8,787 a decade later. The
number of applicants in 2001 was 18,082, among whom only 83 were successful. The
figures for 2002 show a dramatic decline, with only 6,388 applications for
asylum having been received in the first nine months of the year (a decrease of
54 per cent on the figures for the same period in 2001). According to the UNHCR, the Czech Republic ranks eleventh in the world in terms
of its number of asylum-seekers, well ahead of other post-Communist countries.
Seven refugees suffered minor injuries while protesting living conditions in the Cerveny Ujezd refugee camp on 2 August 2000. They clashed with police who had been called to restore order. More than 100 refugees from the camp sent a letter to the interior minister, Stanislav Gross, protesting insufficient standards of hygiene and the ‘violation of human rights’ in the camp, which accommodates some 450 refugees, mostly from CIS countries and Asia. Representatives of the UNHCR visited the camp on 3 August and a spokeswoman for its Prague office said the unrest among refugees in the camp was mainly due to ‘communication failures’.
Far-right parties are marginal in the Czech Republic, although racially motivated violence perpetrated by far-right individuals (and others) is not. In 1998 the SPR-RSC lost its parliamentary representation and has since gone bankrupt. Although far-right parties do at times contest elections, they do not constitute a serious electoral threat. In any case, most of these organizations do not court electoral success, but try rather to mobilize youths (particularly skinheads) through concerts and demonstrations.
According
to official estimates, in 2000 some 6,200 persons were registered as members of
far-right organizations, most of them in northern Moravia and Prague,
representing a 23 per cent increase on the 1999 figure.
A
report released by the interior ministry in July 2001 said that support for
extremist organizations had risen dramatically, as had the number of racially
motivated crimes committed often by members of the country’s 6,000-strong
far-right skinhead movement. In response to the study, the Prague-based human
rights organization Movement for Civic Solidarity and Tolerance called for
tougher measures to be implemented by the authorities and the banning of
neo-fascist groups. On the other hand, Markus Pape, of the European
Roma Rights Center, who monitors racist incidents against the Romany
community, said that an emphasis on prevention and education would prove to be
more effective in the fight against neo-fascism.
In
April 2000 when German television broadcast a documentary claiming that members
of German far-right groups were training in a former military compound in
northern Bohemia, a claim that remained unconfirmed by the Czech interior
ministry. In the same documentary, former minister without portfolio in charge
of the secret services, Jaroslav Basta, said that violence against foreigners
had become commonplace in the Czech Republic, which he characterized as ‘a
very racist country’. He said police officers were in sympathy with the far
right and were even involved in training its recruits. As a journalist in the
documentary commented: ‘It is a historic irony that the Czech Republic, where
Nazism produced 80,000 victims, has now 6,000 persons registered in neo-Nazi
organizations and 10 times as many sympathizers.’
In
August 2000 the mainstream daily Lidove
noviny cited a report by the Czech intelligence service (BIS) claiming that, in 1998–9, special contacts had been
established between members of both ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’
extremist organizations in the Czech Republic and Russian intelligence. The
common concern between the two, reportedly, was opposition to NATO enlargement.
The Russians apparently cultivated links with national-Bolshevik groups that
promote ‘Slavic brotherhood’ and far-right groups such as the VF,
and encouraged co-operation between the two extremes.
Before
the June 1998 parliamentary elections the Czech far right was dominated by
the populist and xenophobic Sdruzeni pro republiku–Republikanska strana
Ceskoslovenska (SPR–RSC, Association for the Republic–Republican Party of
Czechoslovakia), led by the controversial Miroslav Sladek. However, in that
election the party lost its 18 seats in the 200-member Chamber of Deputies,
after failing to reach the 5 per cent threshold. Its unexpectedly disappointing
result, 3.9 per cent of the vote, followed a long period of party scandals and
internal strife. Following this defeat, the SPR–RCS was declared bankrupt as a
result of failing to pay its taxes. After its subsequent unsuccessful showing in
the 2000 regional elections, Sladek created a new party called Republikani
Miroslava Sladka (RMS, Miroslav Sladek’s Republicans). In September 2001
Sladek said he wanted the RMS to ‘return’ to parliament in 2002.
During
this period, despite the problems within his party, Miroslav Sladek continued to
make the bold and provocative statements that have characterized his political
career from the start. For years
Sladek has made virulently anti-Romany comments: ‘The Gypsies have a choice.
Either they can live like us or they can leave, and it won’t be our concern
how, where or for how much’ (1995); ‘If it looks as if the Republicans are
going to win the elections [of 31 May-1 June], most of the Gypsies will leave
the country on 1 June so I won’t have anything to resolve after 8 June’
(1996); he described the Romanies, in his 1996 book Your
Vote Will Decide, as a ‘completely foreign element . . . a potential fifth
column that could end up being a time bomb for our national and state
organism’. Comments made at a March 1999 meeting of the SPR–RSC also clearly
show his vehemently anti-German and increasingly anti-US positions. Marking the
61st anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s occupation by Nazi Germany he told his
supporters that President Havel was ‘kowtowing’ to US Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright in a display of ‘disgusting servility’. Sladek also
accused NATO of making it possible for the ‘Albanian mafia’ to operate in
Kosovo and said that Germany ‘still intends to use Czech territory’ for its
own plans, the Czech News Agency (CTK) reported.
The
Patriotic Republican Party (VRS)
became the first serious contender for the role of leading extreme-right party
after the bankruptcy of the SPR–RSC. The VRS was established in 1995, but
gained strength and prominence in 1999 when the SPR–RSC’s former MPs joined
its ranks. On 5 August 2000 the VRS elected Rudolf Valenta, the former head of
its Prague branch, as its new chairman. The election meeting was attended by
members of other formations, among them the leaders of far-right skinhead
organizations National Alliance and VF,
Vladimir Skoupy and Jan Skacel, respectively. The VRS secretary
Jan Kopal said that the party might offer these groups places on its list of
candidates in the senatorial and regional elections scheduled for November 2002.
In
December 1999 in an exhibition in Decin, organized by the VRS, photographs of
President Havel, Prime Minister Zeman and Civic Democratic Party leader Vaclav
Klaus were labelled ‘Jewish Free Masons and Murderers of the Czech Nation’.
Among the other items on display was a ‘partial list of Jews and Jewish
half-breeds in politics since 1989’. The twenty-four-year-old organizer of the
exhibition was sentenced by a court in Decin to a suspended two-year prison
sentence for the incitement of racial hatred.
On
3 March 2001, at the VRS congress in Prague, the Narodni Socialni Blok (NSB,
National Social Bloc) was founded, with Jan Kopal as its leader,
as an amalgamation of the most important far-right formations in the Czech
Republic, including the VRS, the skinhead groups National
Alliance and National Resistance, and
other smaller organizations. At its founding, Kopal said the organization had
2,000 members. A few months later the non-registered ‘party’ claimed its
membership had grown to 3,000. In May 2001 the interior ministry refused to
register the party officially under its new name on the grounds that the NSB was
the name of an inter-war Nazi organization in the Netherlands and that some of
the NSB’s leaders were associated with the illegal National Alliance. At the
end of 2001 the party changed its name to Prava Alternativa (The Right
Alternative).
The
NSB’s leaders (mostly former skinheads) are repeatedly at pains to distance
themselves from the activities of the skinhead movement. Nonetheless, their
number include those already indicted by courts for racism and the spread of
racial hatred, as well as individuals who are currently under investigation for
the same crimes, among them Skoupy and Tomas Kebza,
the former influential editor-in-chief of the SPR–RSC’s
weekly newspaper Republika.
The
relationship between the far-right electoral parties and the skinhead movement
has been a subject of discussion for some years. While the skinhead movement,
which first appeared in the Czech Republic in the late 1980s, clearly viewed the
SPR–RSC and Miroslav Sladek, for example, as unacceptably moderate, the far
right itself was always more accommodating. As early as 1993, Tomas Kebza wrote
in an editorial in Republika: ‘A
skinhead can rail at Dr Sladek for betraying him or for not being a fascist.
Under the influence of alcohol, a skinhead might even shout, “Long life Havel!”
But a skinhead will never, never stand up for a Gypsy.’
As
for the skinhead movement itself, a police raid in February 1999—which the
Czech security service (BIS)
spent a year organizing—practically crippled the principal far-right skinhead
group Bohemia Hammerskins. The police in Plzen detained twelve skinheads, who
were later prosecuted, before a planned concert of White Power bands and a
meeting in a nearby village. In the course of the raid, unprecedented in the
Czech Republic, the police seized 140 tapes, 161 CDs, 500 Nazi symbols and a
number of printed materials with Nazi content. The police also seized a diary
containing the names and addresses of skinhead supporters and those who donated
money to the movement. Officers involved in the raid were promoted.
The
space left by the demise of Bohemia Hammerskins, especially in Prague, was
occupied by the Narodni aliance (National Alliance), led by Vladimir
Skoupy. The
National Alliance has operated illegally since April 2000 when its legal
registration was revoked by the interior ministry because of repeated violations
of the law, a decision that the Alliance spokesman Zbynek Rais said would be
challenged in the supreme court. The National Alliance openly denies
the Holocaust and the existence of the Auschwitz gas chambers.
The
other main far-right skinhead organizations are Vlastenecka
fronta (VF, Patriotic Front), Narodni odpor (National
Resistance)—also refused registration by the interior ministry—and Blood
and Honour Northern Bohemia.
At
the same day as the above raid in Plzen, police in western Bohemia detained six
members of a previously unknown paramilitary group called Sturmpionier-Battalion
43. The group, which claimed to honour the legacy of the Nazi Wehrmacht, dressed
in Wehrmacht uniforms decorated with Nazi badges and was in possession of
functioning Second World War rifles and a machine gun. The move was welcomed by
Czech Jewish leaders, who considered the raid as a sign that the government was
serious about cracking down on racist crimes and groups.
The
other organization that needs to be mentioned is Republikanska mladez (RM,
Republican Youth), which was established in September 1998 and claims to have
1,200 members, chiefly in northern Moravia. The leader of this organization, Tomas
Kebza, was at one time the publisher and editor-in-chief of Republika. During RM meetings members and sympathizers reportedly
shout slogans such as ‘Czech Republic to the Czechs’, ‘Nothing above the
nation, enough of Havel’ and even, on occasion, ‘Vitezstvi zdar’ (Sieg
Heil!).
Demonstrations and concerts
On
1 May 1999 a parade organized by 300 skinheads took place in Prague, the
participants of which marched shouting slogans such as ‘Arbeit macht frei!’
and ‘Zionists out!’. During the march police clashed with anarchists, who
wanted to disrupt the demonstration.
In
February 2000 an unauthorized demonstration in support of Austrian populist
leader Jörg Haider took place in the centre of Prague. The demonstration
was organized by the National Alliance. Some 120
participants shouted slogans condemning ‘US-Israeli diktats’ and President
Havel, whom they called a ‘parasite’. Police kept the skinheads apart from a
group of some fifty left-wing counter-demonstrators.
On
18 March 2000, some fifty (mainly) skinheads demonstrated in Mlada Boleslav
against Czech membership of NATO and the European Union. They also were
protesting against the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM) as well as
against the detention of National Alliance leader
Vladimir Skoupy on
charges of propagating fascism. They also expressed support for Jörg Haider.
On
28 October 2000 some 150 VF followers marched
to the Vysehrad cemetery in Prague to mark the anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s
independence on that date in 1918. Police intervened to keep some sixty
counter-demonstrators away from the marchers.
In
April 2001 some 400 far-right skinheads from the Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Germany and Poland attended a White Power concert in Senohraby. The concert was
organized by an ‘informal’ group called Aryan Pride, but most of its
‘members’ were from the National Alliance. The
police said they could not stop the concert as the skinheads had hired a room in
a local pub. They detained and later released two skinheads heading for the
concert on the grounds of their wearing racist patches. In June 2001, after an
investigation, the interior minister, Stanislav Gross, cleared the police of
blame for failing to stop the gathering, and said that he intends to set up an
inter-ministerial committee to examine ways in which the government,
intelligence services and other institutions could be enabled to do so. Gross
was responding to criticism from anti-racist NGOs that said Czech police
‘stand and watch’ while neo-Nazis chant racist slogans at rock concerts.
One
week later, after the widespread criticism of police handling of the concert,
Interior Minister Gross said that the police response to a similar concert held
on 14 April in a town north-east of Prague was ‘sufficiently resolute’.
About 150 far-right skinheads gathered in a town near Mlada Boleslav to take
part in a graveyard ceremony and concert. The police detained ten participants,
who were later released, and deported a Slovak who had attended the White Power
concert in Senohraby.
In
August 2001 police stopped a far-right skinhead concert in Plzen when
participants began chanting Nazi leader Rudolf Hess’s name. Later that month
about forty extremists participated in a demonstration against the police
intervention organized by the NSB. Demonstrators accused Interior
Minister Gross of implementing the policies of ‘pseudo-humanist groups and of
hindering free speech’, and said that skinheads were being fired from jobs
because of their opinions. The demonstrators also announced their intention to
engage in ‘various acts of civic disobedience’.
According
to a survey by the Prague daily Mlada
fronta Dnes (9 August 2001), the number of racially motivated crimes rose
significantly in the 1990s. It found that, in 1990, 14 people were accused of
‘defamation of a nation or race’, while in 2000 the number of people so
accused had risen to 150. In 1991 only 10 people had been accused of
‘promoting a movement aimed at suppressing the rights of citizens’, while in
1999 a total of 159 people were accused of that crime. The Prague-based
Documentation Center for Human Rights reported in 1998 that twenty-one people
had died as a result of racially motivated assaults since 1990.
A
police spokeswoman reported, in September 2001, that, during the first half of
2001, 167 crimes committed by far-right extremists had been registered, which is
10 fewer than in the same period the preceding year.
In
May 1998 the local authorities in the northern Bohemian town of Usti nad
Labem announced its intention of building a four-metre-high cement wall in
Maticni Street, dividing two residential areas, with the express purpose of
‘protecting’ the ethnic Czech inhabitants in homes on one side from the
alleged noise, squalor and vandalism of the Romanies living (in state-owned
housing for rent defaulters and others made homeless by previous housing
demolitions) on the other. Despite a ruling by the Chamber of Deputies
overriding the decision to build the wall, the local authorities persisted and
the wall—now a ceramic ‘fence’ with open gates—was eventually built in
October 1999. However, after strong international and domestic protests—as
well as local protests and disturbances—it
was dismantled a month later and, in April 2000, was moved and reconstructed as
part of the local zoo (see Opinion polls). (In April
2000 the constitutional court ruled that parliament had had no right to
contravene the local council’s decision.
In
September 1999, in a town in northern Moravia, a police cadet faced a prison
term for soliciting donations for the ‘extermination of Gypsies’. The
drunken cadet also attacked a local policeman who said he would not support
racists. The policeman suffered a brain concussion.
In
May 2000, CTK, citing Nova
TV, reported that a Romany family in Orlova, northern Moravia, had been attacked
by two skinheads. The perpetrators beat the parents who were trying to protect
their children. The report said that after the attack, the Romanies in Orlova
stopped sending their children to school out of fear for their safety.
In
July 2000 police in the western Bohemian city of Rokycany charged two
seventeen-year-olds with ‘violence against a group of people and an
individual’. The charges followed an attack, five days earlier, on the home of
Romany activist Ondrej Gina, during which two youths threw a Molotov cocktail
through a window, which failed to ignite. The previous day, the windows of the
Rokycany Romany Cultural Association had been broken and petrol poured into the
building.
In
the same month Mikulas Horvath of the Romany Civic Initiative in Ostrava,
northern Moravia, called the situation in Ostrava ‘highly emotional’. He
said that he could not rule out clashes between the unarmed, self-defence units
that the Romanies there have set up in reaction to recent attacks, and members
of the RM, who want to monitor those units.
During
the night of 20–1 April 2001 some twenty German and Czech far-right skinheads
clashed with local Romanies in Novy Bor, northern Bohemia. According to the
police, the fight was started by the Romanies. But the director of Romany Civic
Initiative in Novy Bor, Pavel Turko, said that the skinheads, who had arrived in
the town to celebrate the 112th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth, had
launched the attack.
In
April 2001 Filip Vavra (former leader of the National
Resistance and current secretary of the NSB) and Jan Skacel (leader
of the VF) addressed students at a seminar on
‘Types of Political Extremism’ held at Charles University in Prague. After
the seminar was reported in the press, Charles University Dean Petr Kolar
forbade the participation of representatives of extremist formations in seminars
conducted at the university, and cancelled the series on ‘political
extremism’ at the centre of the controversy. The convenor of that series of
seminars, Zdenek Zboril, accepted the cancellation but denied that the seminars
‘legitimized’ the speakers involved.
In
May 2001 the Czech Jewish community issued a statement in which it expressed its
disappointment that ‘neo-Nazi activities are tolerated in a country where some
80,000 of our kin were killed by the Nazi regime’. The statement went on to
express the hope that the parliament, the government and the courts would come
to the realization that toleration of Nazism is ‘inadmissible’. However, it
continued, ‘we are witnessing the reverse situation’, and such toleration
has grown in the course of the last ten years. The NSB
subsequently lodged a complaint against the Prague Jewish community with the
prosecutor-general’s office. Its leader Jan Kopal said the community’s
statement amounted to ‘scare mongering and the incitement of racial and
national intolerance’.
In
May 2001 three foreigners (two Algerians and a Taiwanese tourist) were victims
of what the police called ‘racially motivated assaults’ in Prague.
In
June 2001 NSB leader Jan Kopal complained about the detention
of five NSB members in Liberec, northern Bohemia, after they burned a portrait
of President Havel. ‘This was no different from lighting a cigarette in
public’, Kopal said. He also protested against the ‘persecution’ of the
NSB, and asked the interior minister to punish those officials who refused to
register the party.
In
the same month an Israeli tourist, searching for her ancestor’s graves,
reported the antisemitic desecration of an abandoned Jewish cemetery in Nyrsko,
west Bohemia, where tombstones were found covered with swastikas and other Nazi
symbols. The cemetry was cleaned by the members of the local Jewish community in
Plzen.
In
July 2001 three young men broke into the flat of a Romany family in As, western
Bohemia, shouting Nazi slogans and causing 10,000 crowns’ worth of damage.
Another Romany was shot at with a gas pistol.
In
Svitavy, eastern Bohemia, also in July 2001, Vlastimil Pechanec, a
twenty-two-year-old skinhead with ties to the far right, fatally stabbed a
thirty-year-old Romany man in a bar. He first shouted racist insults and then
stabbed the man repeatedly in the stomach. Shortly after the murder a poem began
circulating in skinhead circles that celebrated the attack and solicited funds
for Pechanec’s defence. Pechanec had previously been convicted of two similar
offences: he had served a relatively light sentence for the first, and was
placed on probation for the second. In response to the murder, local police have
launched an operation designed to offer greater protection to the Romany
community.
In
August 2001 the local authorities in Sokolov, western Bohemia, decided to erect
a fence around a local cinema whose walls had allegedly been repeatedly
vandalized by Romany children. A local town councillor joked that they had
decided in favour of building a fence rather than ‘a water moat with
sharks’. The authorities in Sokolov also decided to sell council-owned flats
where Romanies live to a local developer, claiming that they could no longer
cope with rent defaulters.
Also
in August 2001, 150 residents of the town of Mimon signed a petition opposing
plans to move twelve Romany families into a converted school building. The
petition’s organizer said that all 6,700 inhabitants of the town would sign
the petition if asked, so strong was local opposition to the plan. The mayor
rejected the petition but argued that the people of Mimon were not racists but
merely acting out of a desire to keep the peace.
In
the autumn of 2001 more than fifty gravestones at a Prague Jewish cemetery were
vandalized by up to seven youths between the ages of 14 and 16. The two
16-year-olds involved were later charged with a racially motivated crime after a
videotape of the incident was found, apparently shot by the boys themselves,
showing them giving Nazi salutes and chanting slogans such as ‘Death to the
Jews’ and ‘Sieg Heil’. The other five youths were not charged as they were
under the legal minimum age of sixteen for racially motivated crimes.
A
poll in May 1999 found that 72 per cent of Czechs did not feel that the idea
of building a wall to separate ethnic Czech residents from their Romany
neighbours was based on racial hatred; only 28 per cent of respondents felt that
it was. Furthermore, 64 per cent of respondents did not consider Czech society
to be racist. The poll concerned the controversial plan by local officials in
the city of Usti nad Labem to build a wall
between the Czech and Romany residents of Maticni Street.
An
October 1999 survey of Czech attitudes by the American
Jewish Committee (AJC), found that: 74 per cent of Czech respondents felt
that ‘we should keep the remembrance of the Nazi extermination of the Jews
strong even after the passage of time’, while 17 per cent felt that, after
fifty years, it was time to put the memory of the Nazi extermination of the Jews
behind us; 57 per cent thought that Holocaust education should be mandatory in
Czech schools, while 30 per cent disagreed; only 8 per cent of respondents
thought that Jews have ‘too much influence’ in the Czech Republic, while 34
per cent believed that ‘Jews exert too much influence on world events’; 70
per cent said it would not make any difference to them if their neighbours were
Jewish; only 8 per cent said they would ‘like to have’ Jews as neighbours
and 17 per cent ‘preferred not to’; finally, less than a quarter (23 per
cent) of Czech respondents strongly agreed or somewhat agreed that Jews exploit
the memory of the Nazi extermination of the Jews for their own purposes.
A
survey by the international organization Opinion
Window in January 2000 found that Czechs exhibit ‘substantially more
widespread xenophobic opinions’ than many other, previously surveyed
societies. The survey stated that only 17 per cent of Czechs could be described
as ‘tolerant’. Half of the respondents were found to harbour antipathy
towards the country’s Romany minority, while 30 per cent had similar feelings
toward skinheads.
In
May 2000, in a poll conducted by
the IVVM (Institute for
Public Opinion Research), 39
per cent of Czechs stated that they were opposed to the sale of a Czech-language
edition of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf,
while 30 per cent did not mind it being sold on the free market. Among those
approving the sale, 49 per cent said they opposed any censorship, while 28 per
cent said they believed that the book provides a lesson about the dangers of
Nazism and 12 per cent said the book is ‘part of history’. Four per cent of
those opposed said that a ban would increase interest in the book.
A
public opinion poll conducted by the CVVM
(Centre for Public Opinion Research) in June 2001 found that 78 per cent of
Czechs thought skinheads were ‘harmful’ to society, against 86 per cent in
2000 and 83 per cent in 1995. Only 9 per cent of Czechs thought that skinheads
were ‘beneficial’, compared with 6 per cent in 2000, 1997 and 1996, 4 per
cent in 1999, and 8 per cent in 1995.
According
to a survey conducted in August 2001 for the Prague daily Mlada fronta Dnes, some 46 per cent of Romanies were living in fear
in the Czech Republic, while roughly one in four was considering requesting
asylum abroad. About 53 per cent of Romanies polled said they had been denied
jobs because of skin colour, 46 per cent had been denied service in restaurants,
and 5 per cent had been denied business contracts.
According
to an October 2001 poll by the Opinion
Window polling institute, some 20 per cent of Czechs (particularly youth)
sympathized with the goals of far-right skinheads, though not with their
behaviour. Support for Romanies was lower than that for skinheads, with 26 per
cent saying they would not mind having a skinhead as neighbour, while only 14
per cent were happy about having a Romany neighbour.
An IVVM poll found that, while in 1991 one-half of Czech respondents said they felt personal hatred towards people of a different ethnic group, in 2000 two-thirds fewer felt the same way. It further found that, in 1991, some 60 per cent said that brute force was the way to handle the Romanies while, eight years later, ‘only’ some 40 per cent were of that opinion. The poll also suggested that support for the skinhead movement had decreased: in 1991, 34 per cent thought that ‘skinheads bring Romanies into line’, while in 1999 the number had dropped to 15 per cent.
The
most controversial case in recent years was the one of the director of the
Prague-based Otakar II publishing house, Michal Zitko, who
persisted in producing an unabridged Czech version of Adolf Hitler’s Mein
Kampf without any contextual material (see Opinion
polls). The first printing of 4,000 copies was sold within days after the
media had first called attention to it. Publication of the book continued
despite objections from Jewish and Romany organizations, and a formal request
from the German embassy in Prague claiming that the State of Bavaria owned the
copyright to the book. Zitko claimed that the book’s publication could serve
as a preventative measure against ‘malignant ideologies’. The police raided
his office and seized 300 copies of the book.
The
seizure was criticized by the Committee for the Protection of Freedom of Speech
and the Syndicate of Czech Journalists. Its spokeswoman said that the ban on
this and other antisemitic or racist books was ‘pointless’, and that
intervention by the police against Mein
Kampf could establish a precedent. She noted that books by Marx, Engels and
Lenin were readily available in shops and libraries, despite the fact that
communist ideology was ‘comparable to Nazism’ and had caused ‘comparable
human suffering’.
In
April 2000 Michael Zantovsky and Daniel Kroupa, both senators for the small
mainstream party, Obcanska demokraticka aliance (ODA, Civic Democratic
Alliance), filed criminal charges against Zitko, calling publication of the book
‘without commentary or a disclaimer’ a criminal act in the Czech Republic
because it amounts to the promotion of an ideology that advocates the
suppression of human rights.
In March 2001 the leader of the NSB
was, for a short period, editor-in-chief of the mainstream tabloid Spigl,
which published interviews with party members. The arrangement was short-lived,
however, as the tabloid ceased to exist a few weeks later.
In
July 2001 police in eastern Bohemia launched an investigation into the far-right
newspaper Nachodsky necas following
accusations that it published articles denying the Holocaust. This followed
allegations by the culture minister, Pavel Dostal, that the paper broke the law
by printing racist articles. The paper’s editor, Jan Kopal, is the leader of
the NSB, which was denied registration as a political
party by the interior ministry in May 2001.
Legal
instruments
In
1999 the cabinet approved guidelines for a law establishing the rights of
national minorities, but added that government ministers had concluded there was
‘no need’ to set up an office for national minorities. In June 2001 a draft
law was approved by the Chamber of Deputies with the support of all the parties
except the ODS (which opposed the law) and the KMCS (which abstained), and
passed to the Senate’s Human Rights Commission. The law provides a definition
of a national minority, guarantees language rights and introduces a misdemeanour
involving racial discrimination, for which the perpetrator can be fined rather
than imprisoned
The
only other legal instrument for the prosecution and punishment (imprisonment) of
racially motivated crimes is contained in Paragraph 260 of the Czech penal code,
which guards against ‘the suppression of the rights of citizens’ and ‘the
promotion of ethnic, religious, nationalist or class hatred’. In June 2001,
Jan Jarab, the government’s human rights commissioner, said that the penal
code requires ‘a high threshold of proof so the people who commit these
[racially motivated] offences are rarely convicted.’
On
20 September 2000 the Chamber of Deputies passed an amendment to the Czech penal
code providing for punishment of people who deny that the Nazis or Communists
committed genocide. The bill also established more severe punishments for
inciting national and religious hatred and included incitement of class hatred
among the punishable offences. It also provided for stiffer penalties for those
who commit such offences as members of organized groups or by means of the
media.
Prosecutions
In
July 2001, the Czech News Agency (CTK) reported that the Czech government’s
commissioner for human rights, Josef Jarab, criticized the Czech legal system
for dealing ‘benevolently’ with attacks committed by right-wing extremists,
‘from police investigators, who do not want to investigate such cases as
racial crimes, to state attorneys and judges, who pass the lowest possible
sentences’. He added that the light sentences could be only explained by
‘certain—conscious or unconscious—sympathies with the offender’, and
suggested that prejudice against Romanies might be the explanation.
In
February 1999 CTK reported that the number of people found guilty of racially
motivated crimes in 1998 dropped by 6 from the previous year. Of the 130 cases
heard, 60 were committed by juveniles and 8 by repeat offenders.
In
March 1999 a Czech policeman from Western Bohemia was charged for racial abuse,
when he shouted abuse at a group of Romanies, including ‘black scum’, ‘nigger
lips’ and ‘black bastards to the gas chambers’. The same policemen was
given a year’s suspended sentence for wearing a swastika armband in public.
While he was suspended from duty, he was not dismissed from the force.
In
June 1999 a court banned Tomas Kebza, leader of RM and
former editor of the SPR-RSC’s
weekly Republika, from publishing for
ten years. The court handed down a three years’ suspended sentence. Kebza was
found guilty of ‘promoting a movement aimed at suppressing the rights of
citizens’ in two antisemitic articles.
In
June 1999 Vladimir Skoupy, leader of the National
Alliance, was found guilty of ‘promoting a movement aimed at suppressing
the rights of citizens’ and of defamation of a race. (The latter charge
referred to a
speech in which Skoupy denied that the Holocaust took place;
among other things he said that the gas chambers never existed and that
the Holocaust was ‘an invention’.)
He was sentenced to one
year in prison, suspended for four years. In February 2000, however, police
arrested Skoupy twice, once for wearing Nazi symbols at a demonstration
in Prague and, later in the month, for disseminating fascist propaganda at a
banned anti-communist demonstration organized by the National Alliance and the VF
outside the headquarters of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM). Skoupy was imprisoned for
violating the conditions of his suspended sentence but, in June 2000, was
released.
In
August 1999 three skinheads were found guilty of the murder of a
seventeen-year-old Romany and convicted to six-and-a-half to eight-and-a-half
years in prison.
In
October 1999, during the controversial construction of the wall to separate
Romany residents from the other inhabitants in Usti
nad Labem, three Romanies were arrested and charged after a fight with a
Czech man who was severely beaten. In June 2000 a court in Sumperk, northern
Moravia, found the three guilty of committing a ‘racially motivated crime’.
The oldest defendant, aged 34, was sentenced to four years in prison. His
brother and one other Romany received suspended sentences of 3 and 18 months,
respectively.
On
14 April 2000 police in Vojtanov, west Bohemia, detained two Vietnamese men,
aged 25 and 32, who, according to the Czech News Agency (CTK), were charged with
infringing copyright laws and ‘promoting a movement aimed at suppressing the
rights of citizens’. The two Vietnamese were selling neo-Nazi propaganda in a
market near a Czech-German border crossing. One day earlier, police in Cheb,
also near the German border, brought charges against a Vietnamese woman selling
neo-Nazi recordings at a market.
In
August 2000, a twenty-year-old Czech soldier who beat up a teacher from the
United States in November 1998 in Hodonin, south-east of Prague, was found
guilty of ‘hooliganism and assault’ and sentenced to a suspended two-year
prison term. The teacher was knocked down, beaten and kicked after defending a
group of Romanies, whom the soldier had been insulting. The judge ruled out a racial
motivation, based on a police investigation of the incident. In a statement to
the Associated Press, the US Embassy said it is pleased that the assailant had
been convicted but expressed disappointment at ‘the leniency of the
sentence’.
In
December 2000 a Prague district court gave Michal Zitko, the publisher of
the controversial Czech-language edition of Hitler’s Mein
Kampf, a suspended three-year sentence, and fined him 2 million crowns (c.
US$55,500) for spreading racist propaganda. In February 2001 the Prague city
court overturned the decision and sent the case back for re-examination. It
ruled that ‘serious judicial mistakes’ had been made at the previous trial.
In November 2001 a court in Prague upheld the original sentence. Zitko again
appealed the court’s decision.
In
December 2000 a court of appeal in the northern Moravian town of Karvina
increased the sentences of two far-right skinheads involved in the death of
Milan Lacko to one and three years in prison. In May 1998 Lacko was beaten by
racist skinheads and left lying in the road, where he was fatally hit by a
vehicle whose driver failed to come forward. In the original trial, the state
prosecutor argued that it was the unknown driver who was responsible for
Lacko’s death and not the skinheads, who were charged with racially motivated
assault. The court accepted the argument and the four skinheads were found
guilty and given suspended sentences. They were welcomed by noisy celebrations
outside the court at the close of the trial, a scene captured by a British
television crew making a documentary about anti-Romany discrimination in the
Czech Republic. After considerable protest (and new evidence by the police
identifying the driver as a police officer named Marian Telega), the appellate
court ordered a new trial in September 1999. In the re-trial Telega was found
guilty of driving the vehicle and also given a suspended sentence. In May 2001
an Ostrava appeals court requalified the sentences handed down against the four
skinheads, increasing the suspended sentences against two of them and confirming
the prison sentences of the other two.
In
January 2001 a pub owner in the western Bohemian town of Rokycany was found
guilty by a court in Pilsen of racial discrimination and inciting racial hatred.
Ivo Blahout was fined 8,000 crowns (c.
US$200) for ordering his staff to refuse entry to Romany customers. Blahout says
he instituted the ban in 1995 when a group of Romanies smashed up his pub in a
fight and had the right to defend his business. He told reporters that he would
not pay the fine and would take the case to the European Court of Human Rights.
In
March 2001 a judge in the northern Moravian town of Jesenik acquitted, for the
second time, four of the six youths charged with a racial attack on a Romany in
a local nightclub in July 1999. Two of the accused were given suspended
sentences of 18 and 20 months. After the initial acquittal, the supreme court
sent the case back, saying the attack was premeditated and that each of those
charged—not only the two who had administered the beating but also the four
who had stood guard—were accomplices in it. But the lower court judge ruled
that four of them ‘only formally met the legal conditions for being charged
with conspiracy’ and that ‘their behaviour was not socially dangerous’.
The prosecution again appealed against the decision. But, in October 2001, the
regional court in Olomouc upheld the earlier verdict and sentence
Also
in March 2001 sixteen skinheads were found guilty of a racist attack in the
southern town of Ceske Budejovice in November 1999, when they assaulted a party
of Romanies celebrating in a restaurant in the town centre. Twenty-three youths
were originally charged with attacking the restaurant
with bottles and stones and chanting slogans such as ‘Gypsies to the gas
chambers’ and ‘black bastards’. Six of the
defendants were given prison sentences of up to two-and-a-half years, and
another ten were given conditional sentences.
In
August 2001 a court of justice reduced an earlier fine imposed on Vit Varak for
selling Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf on
the Internet. Varak, who faced a year in prison if he failed to pay the fine,
was found guilty of ‘promoting a movement aimed at suppressing the rights of
citizens’.
According
to the Prague daily Mlada fronta Dnes
(12 September 2001), the Central Bohemian regional court reduced the prison
sentences of several youths—who were convicted of a racially motivated attack
on a group of Romanies in the central Bohemian town of Podebrady—to suspended
sentences.
In
September 2001 the leader of the illegal NSB, Jan Kopal,
was charged with ‘promoting a movement aimed at suppressing the rights of
citizens’ after stating that the United States ‘deserved’ the terrorist
attacks on New York of 11 September.
In
February 2002 a court sentenced twenty-one-year-old Radek Bedri to two years in
prison for an attack on a Romany family in the Ostrava region. Bedri threw a
petrol bomb through a window into the family’s home in 1998 while they were
asleep. One woman barely survived the attack, suffering second- and third-degree
wounds. The court ruled that the attack was racially motivated. Two other
defendants in the case were released for lack of evidence. Bedri has decided to
appeal the decision.
In
the same month a court in the eastern city of Ostrava handed down mostly
suspended sentences to five youths convicted of petrol bomb attacks on two
Romany homes in the town of Krnov. The oldest defendant, Libor Kubela, was sent
to prison for three years while the other four (who were under eighteen at the
time of the attack) received suspended sentences. The attacks took place in
February 1996, and left one woman seriously injured in hospital. The court heard
how the youths, one of whom admitted to being a member of a far-right skinhead
group, deliberately sought out local Romanies. But the defendants claimed they
were merely testing the petrol bombs on vacant houses.
In
March 2002 Vlastimil Pechanec, the skinhead who fatally stabbed a
Romany man in a bar in July 2001, was sentenced by a court in Hradec Kralove,
eastern Bohemia, to thirteen years in prison after being found guilty of murder. Police were forced to intervene outside the court as a group of
skinheads supporting Pechanec tried to attack human rights activists.
Later
that month a Prague court also handed down an unusually long prison sentence in
the case of twenty-three-year-old Frantisek Sobek, an active member of the
neo-fascist skinhead scene. Sobek was sentenced to seven years in prison after
being found guilty of assaulting two men and a pregnant woman in Prague in May
1999, following the Czech ice hockey team’s victory in the World
Championships. Sobek had been previously found guilty of other similar offences
but had always received suspended sentences, which, the judge noted, had
evidently been ineffective. Sobek is launching an appeal against the ruling.
‘Czech
skinheads who shout Nazi slogans do not realize that, if Nazism had prevailed,
they would not exist’, Vaclav Havel told a Prague conference on the Jewish and
Romany Holocaust on 6 October 1999. President Havel said that ‘whoever denies
the past or casts doubt on it, be it an American neo-Nazi, a member of the
German Witiko Bund or a Czech skinhead, is equally dangerous to democracy’.
In
the face of criticism over police inaction at a April 2001 White Power
concert, Interior Minister Stanislav Gross said that ‘the fight with
extremists is becoming for me one of the main priorities’. President Havel
said he was shocked by the indifferent approach of the police regarding such
demonstrations of racism.
On
8 April 2001 the Czech Republic, for the first time ever, marked International
Roma Day. Towns and cities throughout the country hosted a series of events in
the days leading up to 8 April, including concerts, street parties, rallies and
a charity football match. All of the events were organized by Romany groups
themselves.
In
May 2001 Czech religious leaders joined with the Jewish community in condemning
neo-Nazism. Czech Christian Academy President Tomas Halik, seen by some as a
possible presidential contender, said that in Czech society ‘there are
minefields of prejudice’ that can ‘serve as explosives’. He added that
‘indifference on the part of a large segment of the public, including those
who are in responsible positions, towards the expression of neo-Nazi postures
and the ever growing cult of violence is alarming’. Bendrich Jetelina,
speaking for the Czech Seventh Day Adventists, said that ‘every person should
have the right to express his or her opinion, but that right ends where the
rights and dignities of others are infringed upon’.
Also
in May 2001 the government agreed to use undercover agents in the struggle
against hate groups, such as the neo-Nazis’. Gross said that the use of such
agents had previously been hindered by ‘differing interpretations of some
legal provisions’.
In
July 2001 the German and Czech authorities reached an agreement on co-operation
in the struggle against far-right propaganda, and in particular against the
German organizers of skinhead concerts in the Czech Republic. Eighty-two such
concerts took place in the Czech Republic in the year 2000.
In
August 2001 the League of Ethnic Minorities of the
Czech Republic launched a
two-month media campaign against racial prejudice and xenophobia under the
banner: ‘We all live together here. Why do you mind?’ The campaign included
television and radio spots and the dissemination of leaflets. The spots featured
a black man proposing marriage to a Czech girl, a Romany woman giving blood to
save another woman’s life, and a Vietnamese who moves next door to a Czech.
Institute for Jewish Policy Research
© JPR 2002
