Officials use virus as cover to target Roma

BURGAS: In Bulgaria, Roma communities were sprayed with disinfectant from crop dusters this spring as coronavirus cases surged in the country. In Slovakia, their villages were the only ones where the army conducted testing. And across Central and Eastern Europe, reports of police using excessive force against Roma spiked as officers were deployed to enforce lockdowns in their towns.Human rights activists and experts say local officials in several countries with significant Roma populations have used the pandemic to unlawfully target the minority group, which is Europe’s largest and has faced centuries of severe discrimination. With Covid-19 cases now resurging across the continent, some experts fear the repression will return, too. To make matters worse, activists say such discrimination often draws little opposition from other Europeans and the Roma are reluctant to speak about it, fearing repercussions. One afternoon, Azime Ali Topchu, 48, said the police-enforced lockdown of her village in Burgas, on Bulgaria’s Black Sea Coast, made her family “really sad.”

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“It was hard. Hard. For my whole family to go to work _ for my husband and son they had to go, fill in the papers, so they could go through the police checks,” she said, as her three grandchildren played near piles of neatly stacked wood. But Topchu, who lives in a one-story brick house next to her son and daughter-in-law, was unwilling to go much further than that. The streets of their village were sprayed with disinfectant, though not from the sky, several months earlier.

Topchu said she considered the disinfecting “something that had to be done.” But other Roma villages, in Yambol, Kyustendil and elsewhere in Bulgaria, were showered with thousands of gallons of disinfectant from helicopters or planes usually used to fertilise crops in March and April, according to local authorities and Bulgarian Roma activists.

“That was clearly racist, because it was only done in Roma neighbourhoods,” said Radoslov Stoyanov of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, a human rights group. “The broader message that was sent to the non-Roma population was that the Roma are dangerous.“

The Roma people are descended from tribes in northern India, and centuries of persecution and marginalisation have left them some of the poorest and least educated people in Europe. Known pejoratively as “gypsies,” many live in segregated neighbourhoods, often with limited access to electricity, running water and health care. Many face discrimination in getting jobs.

The stringent measures used against Roma communities come even though no big outbreak was ever reported among them, and echo the way some governments have used the pandemic as cover for repressive tactics. Many European countries do not track coronavirus cases among the Roma, but Slovak officials reported at the end of the summer that there had been 179 cases in Roma districts, out of a population of more than 500,000.

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Officials in other European countries have also targeted the Roma: A mayor in northern Moldova blamed their communities for spreading the virus, while a Ukrainian city official in Ivano-Frankivst instructed police to evict all Roma from the town. This is not limited to Eastern Europe: the mayor of a village outside Paris called on residents to contact the French government “as soon as you see a caravan circulating,” referring to the Roma. In a recent report, the European Roma Rights Centre documented 20 instances of what it called disproportionate force by police against Roma in five countries, noting that was an unusually high number. In one video on social media, a Romanian officer appeared to repeatedly press a knee into a handcuffed man as he was dragged following the arrest of several people for flouting virus restrictions. Elsewhere in the country, the group reported police used tear gas and pepper spray to disperse a group of Roma, including children, who had climbed on top of an apartment block during the lockdown.

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