European countries using Covid to target Roma

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”.

“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 onestory 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 several months earlier.

Topchu said she considered the disinfecting “something that had to be done”. But other Roma villages elsewhere in Bulgaria were showered with thousands of litres 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 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.

Widely 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, getting medical care and have a shorter average lifespan than non- Roma.

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.

In May, two UN human rights advocates sent an open letter calling on the Bulgarian government to suspend its pandemic- related police operations in Roma communities and to “stop hate speech” after a nationalist party leader described the communities as “nests of infection”.