Home » The death of a Roma who remembers that of George Floyd – Tim Gosling

The death of a Roma who remembers that of George Floyd – Tim Gosling

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Warning. The links to the videos included in this article contain strong images.

A man lies in the street in distress, while an officer pushes a knee to his neck. Passers-by try to say that the man cannot breathe. A few minutes later he died.

Stanislav Tomáš, 46, died on a muggy June afternoon in Teplice, a small town in the northwest of the Czech Republic. The video of the incident shows three policemen trying to control a man who screams and resists frantically. Passers-by tell the police to stop “asphyxiating him” and urge Tomas not to fight. At the end of the six-minute cutscene, the man stops moving.

The video sparked the anger of Roma organizations and made comparisons with George Floyd’s death in the United States. Michael Miko, president of Romanonet – a network of Czech Roma NGOs – condemned the incident calling it “the pinnacle of brutality”.

The versions of the facts
But if Floyd’s death has transformed Black Lives Matter into a global movement, it is unlikely that Tomas’s disappearance will give impetus to Rome Lives Matter, the equivalent of Central Europe seeking to denounce the discrimination and violence with which this minority does the math every day.

As with the infamous nine minutes and 26 seconds that Floyd spent below Derek Chauvin’s knee, a story battle quickly developed around Tomas’s death, despite the episode being filmed.

Consistent with the populist trend of the moment, the “truth” is no longer the reality but the object of a bitter debate based on personal points of view. Claims and counter-claims, violent personal attacks, “benevolence” and all kinds of propaganda, emotional appeals, flattery and harsh denials are used to try to convince public opinion.

When the video of the episode began to attract attention on 21 June, the Czech police moved quickly to claim that her actions had nothing to do with Tomas’s death, claiming that she had arrived at the scene and to have found him wounded on the ground. When the officers approached him, they said, the man became aggressive. At that point the police would have acted to neutralize him and called an ambulance. After being loaded into the ambulance he collapsed and died, police say, saying doctors say his death was due to drugs.

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“There is no Czech Floyd,” police said not long after, spreading a another movie. In this scene, a half-naked man lies screaming on the ground, evidently in a state of emotional and physical distress. Then he jumps to his feet, tries to attack another shirtless man, and repeatedly hits the window of a nearby car.

A clear strategy
Immediately after, a police statement arrived stating that the autopsy “excluded a link with the operation that preceded the arrest of the suspect. According to a preliminary report, it is suspected that the man was under the influence of a substance from the amphetamine family, and the autopsy revealed pathological malformations in the coronary arteries of the heart ”.

The strategy appears clear, according to Gwendolyn Albert, a Roma rights activist. “They just say he was on drugs and then they hope people don’t believe their eyes. But watching that video is horrible ”.

Indeed, the terminology used by both sides reveals the underlying issues around which discrimination against Roma revolves.

In the police version, Tomas was a repeat offender and a drug addict. Yet Tomas’s relatives and neighbors tell a different story, of a rehabilitated person who did not take drugs and was looking forward to starting his new job as a security guard.

Neighborhood residents told local media that they cannot say for sure whether the person in the second video is Tomáš. The face of the screaming man is never clearly visible. They also say the police told him not to talk about the incident.

Whatever the truth, the distrust between the Roma community and the police is evident. “People blame us for not intervening,” a resident of the house in front of which the accident occurred told local reporters. “They say we should have done something, come to his aid and not let the policeman keep pressing his knee on his neck, but I was afraid. I didn’t want to die. If I had stepped forward to defend him, they could also have thrown me to the ground and pressed on my neck ”.

Deafening silence
The terms of the discussion are clearly unbalanced. Both the police and the neighborhood act on stereotypes of antirom sentiments, which portray them as common criminals, drug addicts and with little desire to work.

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These prejudices are not hidden even by those who occupy the highest political offices. President Miloš Zeman regularly accuses a community that makes up 2 percent of the population of being made up of “misfit citizens” who refuse to work.

The fact that such rhetoric did not stop Zeman from winning several elections testifies to the widespread discrimination against Roma in the Czech Republic.

The history of the minority across the region is littered with horrific examples of abuse, including forced sterilization and segregation at school. The prejudice in the housing market has created ghettos where the Roma population lives in conditions that are difficult to imagine. About half of the 250,000 Czech Roma are classified as “socially marginalized” in government reports.

The political response to Tomas’s death reflects the reluctance of Czech society to recognize these problems, and even more so to try to address them.

Interior Minister Jan Hamáček is the only political figure to have commented on the incident. When he did, he offered unambiguous support to the police even though conflicting reports were still emerging.

“The police officers who intervened have my full support,” said Hamáček. “Anyone who is under the influence of drugs and breaks the law must deal with the intervention of the police. It is above all thanks to the work of police officers that we are among the top ten safest countries in the world ”.

No other high-level political figure, either from the government or from the opposition, has spoken out on the case as of this writing.

In response, the Czech government’s commission on Roma minority affairs asked for a thorough investigation. “The obvious similarity between this case and the death of African American George Floyd after a police intervention in the United States in June 2020, with the use of very similar techniques, raises a question of fundamental interest for all of society, on the use proportionate or not of the force on the part of the police during their interventions, ”the statement read. “We condemn all violence, including police brutality.”

The Ergo network, which brings together European Roma rights organizations, yes beats for the same goal: “We ask the authorities not to cover up the real cause of death and that there is an adequate investigation, which also evaluates a possible motivation based on prejudice”.

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“The political silence is deafening,” says activist Albert. “Nobody sees the matter as an issue from which to derive political advantage.”

Little solidarity
Political silence is the result of a more general apathy. There is little evident support in the Czech media or social networks for inquiries. Putting aside any doubts about police actions, or even the most basic empathy, the majority of the comments see it as a simple case of a Roma criminal who got what he deserves.

It is therefore not surprising that in the same country where the Black Lives Matter movement has obtained some support, even though the black population is scarce, the Roma Lives Matter movement does not attract practically any solidarity.

This leaves Roma rights activists largely alone in saying that the Teplice incident is a demonstration of the systematic racism that this minority faces on a daily basis. At the very least, they say, Czech society should demand close surveillance of police actions in these situations. The Czech police are trusted by nearly 80 percent of the population, according to recent polls. But the reports of brutality presented by the Roma community are numerous.

The circumstances of Tomas’s death resemble those of George Floyd, but also those of another Czech. In 2016, a 27-year-old Roma – known only by the initials MD – died after police stopped him outside a pizzeria in the town of Žatec, just fifty kilometers from Teplice, in the same disastrous industrial region.
It was reported that after being thrown out of the psychiatric ward of the local hospital, the man had had an altercation in the pizzeria. Although it was said that the police had allowed his opponents to beat him while holding him on the ground, no charges were filed.

“The authorities don’t seem to take the incident seriously,” says Albert. “They don’t seem to care how inhumane they appear. They behave as if it were perfectly normal to die when stopped by the police ”.

(Translation by Federico Ferrone)

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