CZECH REPUBLIC

Czech MP Chaloupka (VV) makes xenophobic remarks about Roma

FROM ROMEA.CZ

http://www.romea.cz/english/index.php?id=detail&detail=2007_3088

Yesterday the Czech newspaper Parlamentní listy published an interview with Czech MP Otta Chaloupka (Public Affairs - VV), who has previously made it into the public eye with his verbal attacks against Romani people. Yesterday's interview was no different and included an entire constellation of generalizing, xenophobic statements.
 
To start, Chaloupka labeled most Romani people as troublemakers and a burden on society. In his view, Romani people contribute nothing useful to society even though the state invests a great deal of money into them.

"What is problematic is that they cost a lot of money and don't contribute anything, and that's how it is with them from one generation to the next and they are making no effort to change that. They cost us hundreds of millions of crowns and what do we get for it? Physical attacks, robberies, shoplifting, etc," Chaloupka said.

Chaloupka then went on to complain about human rights defenders, whom he labels "pseudohumanists" and says are preventing the solution of a wide variety of problems. On the other hand, he reportedly understands the efforts of the Czech Human Rights Commissioner, who is planning to abolish the "practical" schools so children will attend mainstream elementary schools together. Nevertheless, he doesn't see much success in those efforts:

"That will be a problem because there are well-known cases of children from decent families having problems with the children from the inadaptable families because they really are inadaptable. I understand the effort to do something about this and to try to include them, to re-educate a generation of the inadaptables and give them all the conditions needed to become decent people who won't cause difficulties and won't be despised but how many years has it been going on that we have been doing our best to include them somehow and it has had no effect?"

At the end of the interview, the MP also gave his view of the recent conflict in Tanvald during which a Romani youth was shot dead. The MP unequivocally labeled the shooting victim the aggressor in the conflict and had no time for any other arguments. The shooter's response seems the best to him:

"If a 13-year-old Gypsy attacks me with a knife, I have the right to shoot him in the head."

Convicted con artist Lukáš Kohout, the infamous organizer of the anti-Romani demonstrations in Varnsdorf last year, has responded to Chaloupka's statements

in a surprisingly hypocritical way. Kohout said he has decided to file criminal charges against the MP on suspicion of the felony crime of defamation of a group based on ethnicity, nationality, race or other characteristics. Yesterday evening Kohout sent a copy of the charges to Parlamentní listy, which published them on its website.

Parlamentní listy, lh, translated by Gwendolyn Albert
ROMEA