The new ethnic cleansing: This disturbing dispatch from Eastern Europe reveals how racism exploited by politicians is driving thousands of Roma to flee to Britain



Roma across eastern Europe have been fire-bombed, raped and murdered

One Hungarian columnist suggested running over Roma children in cars

In Slovakia some want to build high walls around gipsy settlements



Changing migration laws will allow exodus to Britain from January 1



On the fifth floor of a high-rise block on a decaying East European housing estate, a gipsy family pack their bags to flee the country where they live but are despised.

Within a couple of weeks, Marek Geza, his wife Izabel and their four children will have left the ghetto which they and 4,000 other Roma people call home on the outskirts of Kosice, the second biggest city in Slovakia.

They will bundle their pitiful possessions onto a bus and travel west across a border-free Europe, hoping to start a new life in Britain.

The new ethnic cleansing: Marek Geza, 30, Izabel Geza, 27, Kitty the cat and their five-year-old daughter Izabel, five, plan to flee to Britain from a filthy suburb of Kosice in Slovakia, where 4,000 Roma live Bleak: It is obvious where the Roma areas begin - potholes appear in the roads and rubbish goes uncollected

Izabel, 27, her face pinched with poverty, says: ‘I’ve relatives in Sheffield, Bradford and Kent. My brother, in Dover, has ten children and, ideally, we would like to join him there.’

Then, she adds a question that sums up the fears of many Britons over an influx of European Roma heading for the UK: ‘Do you think your Government might give us a free house?’

Marek puts his arm around his dark-haired wife before stating sadly: ‘Life here is so difficult for us gipsies that we have lost hope. We are hated by the white Slovakians.’ He says that virulent racism is directed against the Roma population and they face daily hostility.

Sad: A young boy searches through rubbish in Lunik IX, the Slovakian suburb. One Roma resident said they face daily racism

‘The bus conductors tear up our paid tickets and throw us off into the streets. Last week, an ambulance driver bringing the body of an old gipsy man back from the hospital morgue in readiness for his funeral at our church refused to enter our ghetto.

‘The dead man’s family had to collect the corpse from the ambulance parked down the road.

‘The racists are making life terrible. They are trying to chase us out of the country. Under communism, we were treated as equals. We had jobs and houses. But now many politicians call us dirt.’

Marek fears for gipsies in Slovakia and other former communist bloc countries. His family is just one of many turning their eyes towards Britain, Germany, France, Belgium and Spain.

The result is that we are witnessing a significant exodus of people from the East — an insidious form of ethnic cleansing for which tolerant, liberal democracies such as Germany and Britain are picking up the bill.

Among them are thousands of Slovakian, Hungarian and Czech Roma. They are legally entitled to live in the UK because their nations of origin are already in the EU, giving them rights to work and claim benefits in other member countries.

Next Wednesday, on January 1, Romanians and Bulgarians will be granted the same access to Britain (although with a three-month wait before being entitled to claim benefits). Their impending arrival has exposed the fact that the Government has no inkling how many will come.

Yet the truth is that many Romanian and Bulgarian Roma are already here. They have taken advantage of EU rules that allow them to stay for 90 days — which they exploit by leaving Britain at the end of the period, only to return, legally, for another 90-day stint. It has allowed them to put down roots with ease right across the country.

They have also seized on legal loopholes by stating they are self-employed (one ploy is to become a seller of the homeless magazine Big Issue, of which a third of sellers are East Europeans) which entitles them to welfare benefits and free healthcare.

Work: Alexander Gadzor, 30, with his National Insurance card in Slovakia, where authorities build walls to separate gipsy communities from those of other citizens. Migrants can enter the UK from Wednesday

Big Issue founder John Bird this month revealed that he warned the Labour Government — to no avail — not to ‘open the sluice gates to the feral poor’ but to help them in their own nations.

Meanwhile, David Cameron is calling for curbs on so-called benefit tourists, a stance which prompted Liberal Democrat Vince Cable to retort last week that the Prime Minister’s rhetoric was reminiscent of Enoch Powell.

The 2011 census did not specifically do a headcount of the number of Roma in Britain, which means councils are unable to work out how to cope with the extra numbers. But it is clear that public resources — such as GP surgeries, refuse collection services and schools — are already overstretched with the new arrivals.

And a report by York University published two years ago, on behalf of the European Commission, found that between 600,000 and one million Roma had headed to the UK since the communist bloc collapsed.

More recently, a lower figure estimated by the respected charity Equality UK has put Roma numbers at 500,000, far higher than the 200,000 which is widely quoted by politicians from a report by Salford University earlier this year.

In truth, it is difficult not to have sympathy for the Roma, for they are increasingly the victims of ugly and violent far-Right movements that have growing support across central and Eastern Europe. Such discrimination is a chilling echo of Hitler’s anti-Roma policies in Nazi Germany in the Thirties.

Filthy: The suburb of Kosice, Slovakia, is strewn with rubbish. Its inhabitants are ignored by the authorities

Some of the 12 million Roma in Central and Eastern Europe have been victims of attacks, fire-bombing, rapes or even murders by neo-Nazi vigilante gangs.

They are also easy targets for Right-leaning politicians. Inside parliaments and city halls, racist anti-Roma rants are increasingly commonplace with moderate politicians cynically staying silent because defending gipsies is not a vote-winner.

In Slovakia, there is a widespread social apartheid, with some local authorities constructing walls to separate run-down gipsy villages, shanty towns and inner-city slums from non-Roma communities.

Skating on the fringes of society: A young Roma boy plays on his impoverished estate in Kosice, Slovakia

In Hungary, polls show the majority of people don’t want their children to be friends with a gipsy.

And in Romania, a far-Right nationalist group, NAT88, has proposed that it should be government policy to pay £254 to any gipsy woman who agrees to be sterilised.

Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic, the Far-Right is lobbying for ministers to adopt a policy of all-fares-paid repatriation for any Roma who wants to emigrate to India (from where their community originally moved to Europe in the 15th century).

And the National Front For Salvation Of Bulgaria, an extremist party which recently came close to winning its first parliamentary seat, has a manifesto pledge to set up ‘segregated gipsy settlements’ outside residential areas.

Grotesquely, these would have a 24-hour police presence, only very basic living conditions and — according to the Right-wing organisation’s literature — could be turned into tourist attractions styled on those at Native American reservations in the U.S.

If this is not repellent enough, one political columnist, a founding member of Hungary’s governing Fidesz party and friend of the country’s prime minister, has written: ‘Whoever runs over a gipsy child is acting correctly if he gives no thought to stopping and steps hard on the accelerator.’

Earlier this year, after reports that two gipsies had stabbed a man in a bar outside Budapest, the same columnist went further in a Right-wing newspaper, Magyar Hirlap.

He said: ‘The Roma are not fit to live among [other] people. They are animals, they behave like animals ... that needs to be solved immediately and regardless of the method.’

Equally obnoxious views are peddled by Jobbik (translated as ‘right choice’), an extreme party that has become increasingly popular, even among well-educated Hungarians. It is now the third-largest grouping in the nation’s parliament. The fight against so-called ‘gipsy crime’ is its political mantra as it cynically exploits the deep-rooted hatred of gipsies.

Hated: A columnist and founding member of Hungary's ruling political party wrote: 'Whoever runs over a gipsy child is acting correctly if he gives no thought to stopping and steps hard on the accelerator'

Hungary, most influential in modern East European politics, spearheads the shift to the Right — and, as a former Nazi axis power, it has an uncomfortable history. During World War II, the country’s fascist leaders sent 28,000 Roma to their deaths in German concentration camps.

It’s not surprising that many Roma today fear for their lives and want to emigrate. Bernard Rorke, of the Roma Initiatives Office in Budapest, has warned: ‘Roma are becoming the scapegoats for the wider ills of society.

‘It is not just a hard core of hate from the Far-Right. Much of this disparaging rhetoric is seeping into the political mainstream, which uses it for political gain. It is a deeply worrying trend.’

In the wake of such vitriol, countless Roma are seeking a future abroad.

Jeno Setet, a Hungarian Roma activist, told me last week: ‘My people are looking for a way out because they are frightened.

‘In previous times, the communist creed was that poverty did not exist in a socialist state — and that included the Roma. But that has now changed. We are being forced to live in sordid, isolated ghettos with no electricity, no water and no jobs.

Racism: David Cameron's rhetoric was compared to Enoch Powell, but attacks on gipsies go further in eastern Europe. The National Front for the Salvation of Bulgaria wants settlements with a 24-hour police presence

‘Is it any wonder that people are moving to Western Europe? Ninety per cent of Roma have no work in Hungary. Most have not had jobs for 20 years — since soon after the Berlin Wall was pulled down and the state jobs disappeared.’ He says the two countries that Roma most want to move to are Germany and Britain.

Over the past few weeks, I have visited Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria to investigate the causes of this diaspora of Roma.

Just outside the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, I went to the country’s second-largest gipsy mahala (ghetto) with thousands of inhabitants, which stretches over several square miles.

It is immediately obvious where the border between the Roma community and the rest of the population starts.





It is immediately obvious where the border between the Roma community and the rest of the population starts. Suddenly, streets lights end. The roads become pot-holed and the Tarmac disappears. Mountains of rubbish are piled on the kerbside.





Suddenly, streets lights end. The roads become pot-holed and the Tarmac disappears. Mountains of rubbish are piled on the kerbside.

Boris Georgiev, a 31-year-old father-of-two who was born here, says: ‘We are left in these dreadful living conditions because city officials refuse to enter our ghetto. The bus route stops ten minutes’ walk away and even the police are scared to enter. Prejudice against us is getting worse every day.’

He admits that the Roma community has a bad reputation for social problems and that it is forced ‘sometimes to do something bad to make money’ because of the discrimination.

Over coffee, I meet his friend Georgi Stoianov, 32, his wife Catia, 30, who with their two sons, David and Bodi, live on £30 a month which comes from child benefit payments.

Catia says: ‘We exist from day to day never knowing if the family will be hungry.’

She says they cannot afford to heat their bedroom in winter and that, in any case, the electricity supply is sometimes cut off by the authorities.

Nearby, Ionca Veseliuva, 58, lives in similarly wretched conditions. She helps look after her seven grandchildren (aged between 16 and two), whose mother is her unmarried daughter. Neither woman has a job.

Ionca, like so many other Roma, remembers better days. ‘When Bulgaria was communist, I had a job cleaning every day in a medical clinic. Life was cheaper and everyone, even us gipsies, had food.

Some of the 12 million Roma in central and eastern Europe have been fire-bombed, raped and murdered

‘The state looked after us and made sure gipsies were treated the same as the other non-Roma people. We were not despised then.’

But those times are long gone. The story is the same in Slovakia.

In Kosice, there is a huge Roma ghetto in what is called Lunik IX, a housing estate of high-rise blocks on the fringes of the city.

Under communism, it was a mixed community with houses allocated to the families of army officers, bureaucrats and gipsies. The aim was to integrate the Roma and treat them like anyone else.

But in the early Nineties, as Slovakia embraced democracy, problems quickly developed.

When the Roma started to lose their state jobs, their extended families from all over Slovakia moved to Lunik IX and there was severe overcrowding. Rents and fuel bills went unpaid and it became a slum.

Inevitably, non-Roma residents moved out, pleading with the city authorities for new homes.

The result was that by 1995 not a single non-Roma family was left.

Oppressed: France has also stepped up anti-Roma rhetoric. These people were evicted near Paris last year

According to local newspapers of the time, the estate became a housing complex for the ‘socially problematic’.

Since then, most of the housing blocks have become uninhabitable. Some have been demolished in the past two weeks by the Kosice council because even the metal supporting the outside walls has been stolen, making them unsafe.

The Roma, says social democrat Mayor Richard Rasi, have stripped the inside of the buildings and sold everything of any value.

‘They have removed all the radiators, the water pipes, the taps, all the important parts of the lifts so they don’t work and every piece of guttering is gone.

‘They have destroyed their own homes and they want the other people of Kosice to put it right. The Roma think only of today and not tomorrow.’

He says that voters no longer want to support the Roma. ‘They are fed up of giving money to the people of Lunik IX from their own local taxes.’

Mr Rasi is quite correct about the atrocious living conditions at Lunik IX.

Years’ worth of rubbish is lying everywhere — a stinking mess where stray dogs congregate and boys scrabble for anything they can sell. Every day, the piles get bigger.

Exodus: Many Roma say they will come either to Britain or Germany. Pictured: Bulgarian Aladdin Salim at a makeshift settlement in a former ice factory in Berlin, where police moved in to evict the residents

Marek Geza and his wife have watched as the housing estate around their fifth-floor flat in one of the few remaining habitable Lunik IX blocks has deteriorated.

They say they are ashamed about what has happened, blaming the racism against Roma which stops them getting jobs.

Whatever the truth, is it any surprise that this struggling family — like so many other Roma — is pinning its hopes on a future in the West?

As I turn to leave, a man comes up to me. He is called Alexander Gazdor and tells me he worked in a supermarket warehouse in Kent — where his brother lives — a few years ago before returning to Lunik IX.

Next week, this 30-year-old is returning to Kent.

As if to prove what he says is true, Alexander produces — with a flourish — an up-to-date plastic British national insurance card which allows him to work and claim benefits in the UK.