IN A region where walls and fences come with heavy historical connotations, all of them negative, people are again erecting walls. In Slovakia, an increasing numbers of cities and communities are walling off members of the Roma minority making it even clearer how little they want to have to do with them. Some 14 walls segregating predominantly Roma neighbourhoods have popped up across the country since 2008, the latest erected in the country’s second largest city earlier this month. The walls differ in size and scope, but all are designed to segregate the poorer Roma communities from their neighbours. While such walls exist elsewhere in Europe the Slovak trend is exponentially stronger than anything underway elsewhere, said Dezideriu Gergely, executive director of the Budapest-based European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC). “This reflects and ‘us and them’ rhetoric that says there needs to be a clear distinction,” he said.

Most recently in Košice, Slovakia’s second largest city and one of two European Capitals of Culture for 2013, a wall was erected to separate a densely populated Roma housing complex from a nearby estate. Last year city authorities had cut off water in the Roma neighbourhood, citing unpaid bills and illegal connections to water lines. While Košice city hall insists they did not grant official approval for building the wall, the local council cleared spending nearly €5,000 ($6610) and erected the barrier. Other towns in heavily Roma-populated eastern Slovakia, including Michalovce, Ostrovany and Šarišské Michaľany also have walls. The look of Ostrovany’s imposing 150-metre long wall has drawn comparisons with the Berlin Wall.

The phenomenon is not limited to the poorer eastern half of the country. In the village of Plavecký Štvrtok (a name that translates as Swimming Thursday) some 30 kilometres north of Bratislava, the capital, a series of walls and fences were erected to prevent Roma from a nearby settlement from passing through the village en route to buy groceries or visit a medical centre. Unlike the more formal social housing in the aforementioned Košice case, in Plavecký Štvrtok some 700 Roma, about one-third of the village population, live in an unlicensed settlement on the outskirts of town in self-made homes lacking running water, sewers or central heating.

A group of neighbours (citing security concerns) constructed a series of walls and fences to prevent Roma from passing through their neighbourhood. Though constructed on private property using private money, the village governmted permission to construct the walls. The results have been less than exemplary. “The Roma people are angry,” says Ivan Slezák, Plavecký Štvrtok’s mayor. “The situation in the village is worse and the walls, which were built two years ago, didn’t solve the problems.” Indeed there is no evidence that any of Slovakia’s walls have helped prevent crime in their respective locales.

Forced to walk a more circuitous path en route to the grocery store, Plavecký Štvrtok’s Roma children now linger near a more heavily trafficked road. “The walls complicate our lives,” said Nadežda Huberová, a 45-year-old Roma widow and mother of three. “Children can’t go anywhere, we are afraid of cars. We are upset about it. We feel separated.”

About 2% of Slovakia’s population is Roma, according to the 2011 census, although the number is likely much higher with accurate statistics notoriously hard to come by in Roma communities wary of government surveys. A recent government study estimated the proportion to be closer to 8%. Some 40% of Slovak Roma live segregated from the rest of the population and unemployment among working-age males is more than 70%, according to the ERRC.

Mr Slezák is confronted with problems typical of local politicians dealing with tensions between Roma and the neighbours. As in Košice, unpaid water bills and illegal hook-ups have been an issue. A series of natural-gas pipelines pass through the settlement and national authorities point to safety concerns in saying the Roma settlement must be moved. It remains unclear why nearby non-Roma homes are not marked for a similar fate. “The [national] government says yes to knocking down the Roma homes, but you must find them a new place to live,” says Mr Slezák. “We don´t have enough money to do that and government leaves all these problems on our shoulders.”

For their part, the Plavecký Štvtrok Roma say they have no interest in moving. With some of the group claiming roots in the area that go back centuries, they argue they have as much if not more rights to the land they live on, regardless of formalities like land titles. Mr Gergely has a hard time explaining why the construction of walls is so prevalent in Slovakia and less so elsewhere, even in countries with larger concentrations of Roma. He groups attitudes toward Roma as similar in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Bulgaria, arguing that all have approached Roma from a “security perspective” rather than socio-economically, something he sees as a marked shift. “Before only the extreme right movement took up the Roma subject, now it is part of mainstream politics."