Panicked Roma communities in Hungary are forming self-defense groups after a spate of attacks on their settlements claimed five lives in 10 months. The murders have led police to double the size of a task force investigating anti-Roma crimes and police sources believe the same group may be responsible for attacks using rifles and homemade explosives. Far-right groups have denied any links to the attacks, but emphasize the need to fight “Gypsy crime.”
“We’re getting organized,” says Gyula Borsi, a Roma leader in Tiszalok, northeast Hungary, where the latest victim was buried last week.
“We have no other choice. We won’t permit our members to carry weapons of any sort,” he said. “No guns, no axes.”
The new Roma civil defense groups will patrol until dawn in groups of six in the streets of the cigany-telepek — the ghettoes where the Roma of eastern Europe are usually found.
Ninety percent of Roma interviewed in Hungary in a recent EU survey said discrimination because of ethnic origin was widespread, followed by 83 percent in the Czech Republic and 81 percent in Slovakia. The report, by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, found “high levels of discrimination and victimization among the Roma in the seven member states surveyed.”
The figures for Hungary are particularly alarming, because until now, the country had claimed to have one of the more enlightened pro-Roma policies in the region. There are elected local minority councils, a system of scholarships for secondary and higher education and carefully calibrated funds for schools to try to ensure classes have no more than 25 percent minority pupils.
In the Czech Republic, 500 activists of the far-right Workers Party attacked a Roma settlement in Litvinov, north of Prague last November, with machetes, pitchforks and Molotov cocktails. Three hundred Roma, also armed, gathered to defend their community. At least seven riot police and seven demonstrators were injured in running battles.
In Hungary, the latest victim of the attacks on the Roma, 54-year-old Jeno Koka was buried in Tiszalok on Wednesday, with all the honor and pageant that a poor, marginalized community can muster. Hundreds of mourners came from miles around.
“A storm has descended on us,” Sandor Gaal, the Protestant bishop of eastern Hungary, told the assembled crowd.
Tiszalok recently came third in a national league for offenses per head of the population. At 20 percent, unemployment is double the national average. Factories are closing, or cutting their workforces, as a result of the recession.
Liberal commentators say Roma have now replaced Jews as the main butt of middle-class hostility in eastern Europe. Jobbik, a far-right party hostile to the Roma, won only 2 percent in the last elections, but now expects to easily break the 5 percent threshold and enter parliament in the next.
Its party Web site states: “The phenomenon of Gypsy crime is a unique form of delinquency which is different from the crimes of the majority in nature and force.”
Women’s accessories sold by some of the world’s most popular online shopping firms contained toxic substances sometimes hundreds of times above acceptable levels, authorities in Seoul said yesterday. Chinese giants including Shein, Temu and AliExpress have skyrocketed in popularity around the world in the past few years, offering a vast selection of trendy clothes and accessories at low prices. The explosive growth has led to increased scrutiny of their business practices and safety standards, including in the EU and South Korea, where Seoul officials have been conducting weekly inspections of items sold by online platforms. In the most recent inspection, 144 products from
Turning heads as they cruise past office buildings and malls, driverless taxis are slowly spreading through Chinese cities, prompting both wariness and wonder. China’s tech companies and vehicle manufacturers have poured billions of dollars into self-driving technology over the past few years in an effort to catch industry leaders in the US. Now the central city of Wuhan boasts one of the world’s largest networks of self-driving cars, home to a fleet of more than 500 taxis that can be hailed on an app just like regular rides. At one intersection in an industrial area of Wuhan, AFP reporters saw at least five
China and Vietnam yesterday inked 14 documents spanning cross-border railways to crocodile exports after Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) met with new Vietnamese leader To Lam in Beijing. The Vietnamese president’s visit to Beijing, his first overseas trip since becoming the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam earlier this month, signals a desire between the two communist neighbors to strengthen ties, amid growing trade and investment, despite occasional clashes over boundaries in the South China Sea. “China has always regarded Vietnam as a priority in its neighborhood diplomacy, and supports Vietnam in adhering to the party leadership, taking the socialist
STATE OF EMERGENCY: The governor of Belgorod said that the situation in the border region was ‘extremely difficult and tense’ under Ukrainian bombardment Ukraine yesterday pressed its offensive in Russian territory and bombarded the border region of Belgorod, where the governor has declared a state of emergency. Ukrainian forces entered Kursk region on Tuesday last week and have taken dozens of settlements in the biggest attack by a foreign army on Russian soil since World War II. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Tuesday evening posted footage of a video call with his military chief, Oleksandr Syrsky, who said that “as of today, our troops have advanced in some areas by one to three kilometers.” Over the past day, “control over 40 square kilometers of territory has