Authorities in Kaliningrad – the Russian exclave between Lithuania and Poland on the Baltic Sea – have recently demolished 40 homes that housed about 150 Roma – or “Gypsies – in the village of Dorozhny, leaving them homeless.
According to a Russian news report that only detailed the government line on the matter, it was done for two main reasons:
1) The village had “had a reputation for a long time as a local center of drug-dealing. According to the police, the majority of drugs originated from this area. Local authorities came to the conclusion, that there was no other way to stop the criminal business.”
2) The “majority of Roma live here illegally, without registration, and without anywhere to work. Out of fifty private residences only three were built legally.”
The Federal Ethnic Cultural Russian Roma Autonomy, a Russian-based advocacy group, disagreed:
1) “According to our data there are cases of drug circulation in the village, but the absolute majority of the Roma population has nothing to do with it.”
2) “Practically all the people living in Dorozhny were registered in their houses. More, these houses and land were given to them by the Soviet authorities at the end of 1960s, after the well-known Decree of the USSR Supreme Council that abolished wandering and transfer to the settled way of life. In 2001 the local region court allowed Roma to register the documents for the land, which was annulled after the new governor of the Kaliningrad region, Georgy Boos spoke on TV. He stated that he disapproved the criminal record of the village and said he will “eliminate it with fireâ€. We believe that the real reason for driving the Roma out of their houses is the fact that the land has commercial potential and can later be sold at good price.”
Other Roma advocacy and human rights groups also entered the fray, accusing authorities of scapegoating the Roma for the increasing drug problems many young Russians face and perpetrating yet more racism against the traditionally persecuted Roma people.
