Roma bear brunt of Hungary downturn

Thomas Escritt in Miskolc, Hungary

Financial Times

February 20

When night falls in Hetes, a gypsy settlement on the edge of the northern Hungarian town of Ózd, the men take to the streets and mount a guard, arming themselves with all kinds of makeshift weapons, from clubs to kitchen knives.

"We're up all night," said Henrik Radics, his hands resting on a scythe. "If a car comes in, we stop it and find out what they're doing. If they're peaceful we let them go."

Mr Radics and his companions took matters into their own hands after a spate of incidents that culminated in a house being set ablaze and plans by Magyar Garda, a rightwing uniformed group that claims to protect ethnic Hungarians from "gypsy crime", to hold a recruitment rally in the city.

Ózd is typical of the towns of Borsod county: once a proud industrial centre with a giant steel plant, it has struggled since the fall of communism in 1989, with no employers emerging to create jobs on the scale of defunct socialist-era heavy industries.

But the economic downturn in central and eastern Europe has added new urgency to a problem of marginalisation that goes back decades. Surveys show Hungarians, like many of their neighbours in the region, nurture strong feelings of prejudice against gypsies. That means Roma stand to be hit first and hardest by rising unemployment, which stands at 14 per cent in Borsod county, with its high gypsy population, twice the national level. With the government's own forecasts predicting that the economy will contract by 2.7 per cent this year, unemployment is set to rise sharply.

"The matter has reached critical mass," said Peter Hack, a criminologist. "With the economic downturn, the traditional scapegoat hunt has happened. Since there are no immigrants in Hungary, the Roma are the target."

Zsolt Farkas, a gypsy in Miskolc, Hungary's third largest city and the county's capital, speaks for many when he says work is becoming impossible to find.

"I worked on an assembly line at Bosch, and then I installed shutters in houses, but now it's impossible to find a job. When . . . they see I'm a gypsy, they're no longer interested."

Last month the Movement for a Better Hungary, a far-right party, won 8 per cent in a district election in Budapest after campaigning on a slogan of "gypsy crime". Last week Albert Pasztor, police chief in Miskolc, attracted opprobrium and praise in equal measure when he told a press conference that "all the muggings" on a Miskolc council estate over the past two months had been committed by gypsies, adding: "Hungarian and gypsy culture can't live together." He was suspended on the orders of the justice minister but reinstated less than 24 hours later after a chorus of protest from senior police officers, a cross-party show of support from the city's local government and a 1,000-strong rally well attended by skinheads.

This week the gypsy panic reached hysteria when three professional handball players from Croatia, Romania and Serbia were stabbed in a nightclub, allegedly by a 30-strong gang of gypsies, in the western city of Vesz-prem. The Romanian, Marian Cozma, a rising star, died from his wounds.

In the wake of the murder, Ferenc Gyurcsany, the socialist prime minister, promised to "act decisively" against violence, and the rightwing opposition party said the government's focus should be on catching criminals. "The number of serious crimes committed by people of gypsy origin is rising at an alarming pace," it said.

Janos Ladanyi, a sociologist, says that gypsies, deprived first by resettlement programmes in the 1970s of their traditional itinerant lifestyle and then by the deindustrialisation of the 1990s of the low-skilled jobs on which they depended, have turned to crime, both petty and organised.

"We now have a population that's lived completely outside society for 20 years. Every so often, somebody calls for a quick, simplistic solution, which leads to an outbreak of gypsy-related panic, except this time the economic crisis makes it more serious," he said.

This excluded group, which makes up six per cent of Hungary's population, is also the fastest growing.

"If we can't integrate them into the labour force, then the long-term stability of the fiscal system is in question," said Gordon Bajnai, the economics minister. A package of €2bn ($2.5bn, £1.8bn) to be ploughed into the construction industry is part of the answer, he says, creating the kind of low-skilled jobs this population needs.