Usti Nad Labem / Czech Rep. (RNN Coresspondent) 10.06.1998

A delegation of Czech Roma handed the mayor of the northern town of Usti nad Labem a petition on Tuesday against a plan to isolate a troubled tenement block of Roma families behind a wall.

"This is an insult to all Roma in the Czech Republic," said Josef Sivak, spokesman for the Association of Roma in the Czech Republic, before presenting the petition.

"If we allow this here, other towns will follow suit and then you will have ghettos, followed by ovens, and that will be the end of the Romany," he said.

Mayor Ladislav Hruska said the wall was a reasonable way to protect the town's "decent" inhabitants.

"This wall is not meant to separate people. It is not racially motivated. We simply want to separate the decent people from those that are not," Hruska said.

He initially told the delegation the petition was not worded correctly and that they did not have an appointment but that he would take it into consideration.

The Usti plan, to divide a street with a wall up to four metres high, has added to controversy over the Czech Republic's treatment of its 300,000-strong Roma minority which was highlighted last year when hundreds of Roma sought asylum in Britain and Canada . Only a handful were granted asylum.

The European Union, in membership talks with the Czech Republic, has said the Roma suffer discrimination.

In recent months, there have been a number of racially-motivated attacks. The government has set up a commission to help integrate minorities into Czech society and President Vaclav Havel has said a permanent office for human rights should be established.

The Usti trouble started in 1994 when the local authority moved the Roma into the tenements, opposite non-Roma families.

The street's original residents began to complain to the town hall of noise late into the night, garbage on the street and of being threatened by the Roma.

Now the town hall says it plans to build a wall down the middle of the street unless the Roma clean up their act.

"This is not a ghetto. It will not restrict the Roma movements," said town hall spokesman Milan Knotek. "It is simply our effort to separate the decent inhabitants from those who are not."

The delegation members and the street's Roma inhabitants do not deny that the tenements are a mess.

"There were rats the size of my forearm running round the yard," one inhabitant of the street said. "It took us four months to get the town hall to send us trash containers."

Nonetheless, they refuse to accept a wall as the solution. "We will accept many sanctions, but not a wall," said delegation member Ondrej Gina. "This is just a test of how far they can go.

It indicates that democracy in the Czech Republic is still not working the way it should."