04-02-27 - Infoshop

 

 
Social explosion in Eastern Slovakia
posted by alarm on Friday February 27 2004 @ 07:03AM PST
Europe What we have seen recently happening in Slovakia is something unprecedented here for dozens and dozens of years. TV news have been stuffed with images of Roma kids chanting “We want to eat” in front of a looted shop and angry Roma people throwing bottles and cobblestones, the police firing teargas and using water-canons and special units with submachine-guns raiding homes of looters and rioters. Events we witnessed in Argentina, Bolivia, Iraq or Haiti have come much closer to the reality of working class in central Europe than ever before.

If we want to understand the current revolt of Roma (and to a lesser extent even non-Roma) proletarians in Slovakia, first we will have to look at their situation.

How to get rid of redundant proletarians?

Slovakia is no exception in worldwide attempts of capital at dismantling the welfare state as a way how to gain time and space for surviving its crisis. The latest government reforms of welfare system in Slovakia included severe cuts in benefits for households. So if in 2002 a family of five people could get as much as 17,890 Sk (Slovakian crowns) in welfare benefits, one year later it was 13,650 Sk and this year it is only 6710 Sk. While the average wage in Slovakia is 14,000 Sk a month, during the year 2003 there was a decrease in its real value. Unemployment is approximately 15.6%, but Roma people mostly live in regions, which suffer with double or even higher rates of joblessness and in many of their local communities its rate is almost 100%.

Romas represent some 400,000 people out of total Slovakian population of 5.4 millions. However their share is still growing due to their higher birthrate. Given the previous rates of welfare benefits it was possible for parents with a lot of children to avoid wage-slavery. Of course, they would be very poor, but still it would be possible to survive without starving especially if you could become involved in black economy, shoplifting, petty thefts etc. or rely on your own garden and breeding domestic animals. In fact Romas who have always been the first to be sacked in any wave of redundancies since 1989 – and thus have been to a great extent excluded from the labour market for more than a decade – have not had any other option even if they wanted to work. It is even possible to say that a large part of their younger generation has never been integrated into wage labour.

Slovakian government proclaimed that one of goals of its reform is to prevent working class people from “living on children”. In this way it wants to make of them a real “reserve army” of workers, which would be forced to take any job and thus generally push down the wages which would in turn make the country more attractive for foreign capital. In case of Romas this incentive does not work. It is hard to find even a badly paid job if you live in areas where unemployment does not go below 30% and you are a victim of racist discrimination even on the labour market. On top of that the eastern regions (Presov and Kosice) of Slovakia, where the rebellion broke out, are not destinations of more than 1.8% of those foreign investments. Moreover, foreign capital is generally interested not only in cheap but also in skilled labour force – as suggests structure of its investments (mostly automotive, electronics and steel industries) – and Romas are largely unskilled workers.

And besides that paying out of new lower unemployment and welfare benefits is now conditioned by working in publicly beneficial work schemes (on the lines of workfare). Even if the local authorities would have enough money to hire for these workfare schemes an actually needed number of workers, they would be still unable to provide such schemes for all the unemployed.

Consider all these factors and you can easily arrive at a hypothesis (suggested already by one of our comrades on our webpage http://alarm.solidarita.org) that as for the Roma proletarians an unspoken aim of government reforms is stop the population growth of redundant workers. And they know or feel all of these facts and seen together they make a pretty explosive cocktail. At the beginning of February the Slovakian Intelligence Service warned against a possible class radicalization of Romas which could merge with a more general dissatisfaction in the working class…

Movement of collective expropriations

The first signs of growing social unrest in eastern regions of Slovakia started to appear since the 6th of February. People from a village of Hran in Trebisov district refused to send their kids to school to protest against lower welfare benefits. On the 8th of February there was a rally of several hundreds Romas in Pavlovce nad Uhom against new welfare laws. Four days later there was a similar gathering of 300 people in Michalovce. Romas openly threatened with expropriations.

Since the 11th to 14th of February a Billa supermarket in Levoca was four times repeatedly attacked by a group of more than 80 Romas who looted food. Most of them had only a few rolls in their trolley-baskets, while under their coats they had sausages, meat and various frozen products. Security guard in Billa called in the city-police patrol, but looting Romas threatened them with revenge and explained that they are forced to loot as they do not have anything to eat.

On February 18 a joint protest of Roma and non-Roma proletarians took place in Vranov nad Toplou, where people demanded new jobs. According to official statistics there is 8000 unemployed people in their region and only 50 vacancies. They also condemned anti-social reforms.

On the 20th of February morning shop assistants who were coming for a shift found that their shop in Drahnov is looted. Another expropriations took place in Cierna nad Tisou. From 40 to 50 Romas including children looted food accounting for 40-50 thousand Sk. Thirteen of them were arrested and accused. On the other day about two hundred Romas unsuccessfully tried to loot a COOP Jednota shop in Trhoviste (Michalovce district). Manager locked the shop and called in the police. Looters requested to be let in the shop in order to take food without paying. Police orders were ignored so they called in reinforcements including a special police unit from Kosice. After that Romas dispersed. But in the evening they were back trying to break into the store. Unfortunately 33 of them got arrested.

The 23rd of February saw a gathering of several hundred Romas in the centre of Trebisov. The police declared their rally un-permitted and pushed them out of the town centre. While on retreat they managed to loot a store. Police units drove Romas into their neighborhood and besieged it. In the evening 248 police officers tried to break the furious crowd using water canon, teargas, stun-grenades and even warning shots. Romas responded with throwing stones and bottles injuring two policemen and damaging two police cars and chanting slogans “Fascists!” and “We want to eat!”. After one hour the riot was over, but the area stayed sealed from the rest of the world. On the other day about 30 Romas – including kids – attacked a police bus with stones. Several hundreds policemen again raided the village and Romas dispersed in surrounding fields. 69 of them have been accused of theft, rioting and attacking police officers. One of Roma proletarians commented these events as follows: “We just wanted to point out, that our children are hungry. The government does not give us either money or food and on the top of that they send the police against us.” Shortly after that a government decision to send more than 600 soldiers to the troubled area was publicly announced. “There will be a war, we have got guns!” responded an angry Roma in Trebisov.

On the 25th of February several Roma women, children and one man looted a shop in Caklov. The police arrested them using violence and injuring a small kid. During these last days there was a visible move of lootings from the East of Slovakia to the central and southern parts. Nevertheless, these were only isolated cases. What was important about them, was that in Zemplin (on February 24) also some non-Roma working class people joined the collective expropriations. The fact that news in bourgeois media helped to spark the unrest on several places is also very significant. The protest, looting and riot in Trebisov actually aroused from this source. Romas living there learned what is happening in other places and spontaneously joined the movement. In several other cases Romas came to the supermarkets and declared that they would take food without paying as they saw it on TV.

Repression and recuperation

Besides the direct deployment of the police and army the Slovakian government also tries to play with a racist card to prevent a possible generalization of this class struggle movement. Slovakian president Rudolf Schuster openly warned against this possibility. So they do their best to persuade major population that these are not social riots but “Roma riots” (Minister of Interior Vladimir Palko). They also claim that what is going on is not a real looting, i.e. collectively organized and carried out expropriations, but “ordinary crime, which is being committed every day” (the same person). On the other hand the government line says that it is a looting, but organized by usurers. It is however hard to determine what benefit would those usurers have from attacks on the circulation of exchange value.

But there is also other side of this coin and it is recuperation of Roma proletarians’ struggle. The Minister of Social Affairs, Mr. Kanik, declared that as for the Romas, the government is ready to make some concessions in the reform of social benefits. Meanwhile social workers are being sent to the troubled regions to explain Romas that looting is a bad solution with disastrous consequences. Roma people from Novacany nearby Kosice had been homeless since January 22, when their wooden shacks burnt down. Suddenly on February 24 they got new provisional housing from the government. On February 25 a mayor of Trhoviste village signed a deal with the Labour Office in Michalovce providing workfare jobs for a local unemployed Roma community, which has been involved in lootings. Definitely, this list of examples of attempts at recuperation could be much longer.

Critical role in repression and recuperation have also played Roma middle classes and their political representation. First the Roma Parliament of the Slovakian Republic called for a national day of protests on February 25. It even planed blockades of railways and border check-points. But as the class struggle became more intense and uncontrollable, they backed down and declared that their idea of protests was “misused”. And thus they started to call for a canceling of the day of protests. Nevertheless, unsuccessfully. On many places there were demonstrations, but they remained largely peaceful, without looting and riots. The Roma Council of Slovakia also proclaimed that it is time to finish the protests, because “this is not the right way”. Moreover they offered their help to the police suppressing revolts in the East and proposed them joint patrols: Romas + policemen.

What next?

Just now it seems that the situation has been calming down. So far the heavy repression has intimidated revolting Romas from further mass direct actions. This together with the fact that on a conscious level the movement was very defensive might make its recuperation easier. In this respect it is also necessary to point out that the movement failed to spread into major cities. For example Kosice, center of the eastern region, has got a strong Roma community which remained largely passive for past days.

On the other hand it is needed to stress that the movement was in some cases able to overcome deeply rooted racism against Romas. We have already mentioned two examples, but there were more of them. Especially during the peaceful protests on February 25 Roma proletarians demonstrated together with some “white” workers, who declared their support to the collective expropriations (eg. in Humenne): “they should have done this long time ago” or “we are not surprised by their actions, because it is really impossible to live like this”.

One thing seems to be obvious – capital and its government are not able to solve this problem in the same way as they are not able to solve their crisis. If they will succeed in suppressing the movement this time it will be more like postponement of a day of reckoning.

*This article is going to be published in magazin Wildcat (Germany) *some photos you can find here: http://alarm.solidarita.org/index.php?id=374