Mayor Karvinský’s plan is to build an improved settlement on at a different site. The settlement, new and better than the previous one at Letanovce Myln, will have cold water and electricity. Every Roma family who will live in the housing project will help to build the settlement. They will work for 20% of the cost of a flat in the settlement. At the moment, the structure of four buildings with sixteen flats has been erected.

The new settlement has brought tension to the area. The mayors of the surrounding villages of Hrabušice and Spišsky Štvrtok at the end of February sent an open letter to the Prime Minister Robert Fico stating that “the building of a new Roma settlement just moves this difficult social problem to other villages” according to SME Daily.

A further complication in the matter concerns the new settlement’s proximity to the Slovak National Park. In the past Roma have been accused of stealing wood from the National Park and many believe the new housing location will exacerbate this problem. Accordingly, the mayor has begun a new plan to allow Roma to plant trees for harvesting over a three-year period.

Persistent problem

For more than one hundred years a Romany camp has existed at the site of Letanovce Myln. Václav Havel visited in 1990 (at this time still Czechoslovakia), stating that these living conditions are shameful for the whole republic. Despite of this, previous mayors of Letanovce stated that residents of Letanovce Myln are not residents of the village but rather residents of a local area of another village.

Karvinský is the first mayor of Letanovce to address and to solve the Romany housing problem. These policies have put him into a precarious political position. Many of his non-Roma constituents do not see settlement as something positive, rather, only as the government spending money on Roma. The land purchased for the new settlement was bought from a private owner. Owners of land near Letanovce did not want to sell.

Because of this project for new houses for Roma, Karvinský has received anonymous threats in the mail. According to MF Dnes, one such letter in the summer of 2006, adorned with a skull, stated that if “the building of settlement doesn’t stop, you will end like this [skull]. This is the last warning.” The author also wrote that there are two grenades around the building site. They have not been found by pyro-technicians.

Using funds intended to help integrate Roma into Slovak society, the Mayor’s placing of the settlement away from the city brings into question intentions of the housing project.

“This is a common trend that we can see in Slovakia: money for integration going for further social isolation of the Roma community,” says Ivan Vesely of Dženo Association. “Many times these settlements can be even further away from the village or city than the previous.”
(Dženo)