An Ordinary Pogrom
by Claude Cahn · 11/01/06
Roma are often subjected to a special kind of justice-the justice of the mob. On an early autumn night in 1995, one such mob descended on the Romani quarter in the remote village of Velyka Dobron in Transcarpathian Ukraine.
On the night of 10 September 1995, fires destroyed three houses in the Romani settlement in Velyka Dobron, a Hungarian village in the Transcarpathian region of Ukraine. As the houses were set ablaze, the 400 to 500 Romani men, women, and children who live in the settlement ran to the surrounding woods. The next evening, the crowds returned and destroyed another nine houses, looting and plundering as they went. According to eyewitnesses, local police as well as police from the regional capital were present on both nights, but they failed to stop the mayhem.
The Roma of Velyka Dobron stayed in the woods for two or three months, afraid to come out, living off berries and roots and the occasional meal brought to them by sympathetic villagers, who themselves risked ostracism for their charity. During that time, three young Romani men turned themselves in for the crime that had set the Hungarian villagers against their community: the killing of a Hungarian man, Alexander Dokus, in a brawl. From the news of his death to the news of the perpetrators’ conviction, the local papers reported the event as another Gypsy crime story. The retribution against the Romani community that occurred in between, if mentioned at all, was muted and downplayed. Our organization, the European Roma Rights Center, heard the story the following May from Aladar Adam, chairman of the organization Romani Yag in Uzhorod, the Transcarpathian regional capital. We decided to make a visit to Velyka Dobron and piece the story together.
The Road to Velyka Dobron
It is August 1996, and we are driving eastward from Uzhorod. J., my translator, is an ethnic Hungarian from Uzhorod, or as he calls it, Ungvar. Like many people from the area, he speaks a local dialect of Hungarian, a local dialect of Ukrainian, and the previously official Russian. “I hate nationalism,” he explains. “I wish this was Hungarian again so that all this nationalism would end. Nationalism destroyed this part of the world, and we Hungarians lost our beautiful mountains.” In the early 1990s, rising Ukrainian nationalism and a collapsing Ukrainian economy convinced J.’s family to flee to Hungary. He is a Hungarian citizen now, and he is disgusted with Transcarpathia. There is no order, he says: Uzhorod is run down and the Ukrainians have ruined it.
Aladar is our guide. In his late 40s, Aladar is the leader of all Gypsies in Transcarpathia; “our president,” a Romani girl in Uzhorod explains. Besides heading Romani Yag, he is a member of the Uzhorod City Council and, by profession, a band leader. He waxes wistful about the Soviet era. “We had everything: caviar, vodka. We played in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tbilisi. Girls used to try to break into our hotel after the concert. The army officers appreciated music and knew how to treat musicians. Now we play for mafia, and the mafia are dangerous psychopaths.”
The area we are traveling in is just a stone’s throw from Slovakia and Hungary. Though traditionally populated mostly by Ruthenians, an eastern Slavic people now largely assimilated into Ukrainian culture, the Transcarpathian region has been part of Ukraine only since World War II. Between the two world wars, it belonged to Czechoslovakia, and up until the first it belonged to Hungary. As elsewhere in the ring of territories around modern Hungary, the memory of old, imperial Hungary lives on here in the form of scattered pockets of Hungarian villages. They now sit surrounded by Ruthenian and Ukrainian villages, defensive minorities in a nationalizing state.
The Roma are in between, on the edge of every village: nonparticipants in the nervous triangle that forms between states and peoples around border minorities. Romani streets and Romani quarters are stuck to the edge of almost every ethnic Hungarian village outside Hungary. Roma in this zone of contention often cling to a Hungarian identity that belongs to them only partially. Roma are a lesson and a warning: a local idiom holds that people who give up their culture in the competition of nations have “gone Gypsy.”
The road to Velyka Dobron is dusty and potholed. It ambles through affronted Hungarian villages, dense and stoic, which display the red, white, and green Hungarian flag. We pass women in embroidered dresses and red and green shawls selling fruit. Men shout at black bicycles and humiliated dogs with panicked eyes. Everyone here seems old. On Sunday they attend the Calvinist church. They slaughter goats methodically and clip the pieces into parts to be eaten, parts to be worn, and parts to be thrown away. There is a constant struggle against dirt here, into which all are enlisted.
It is hot and dusty. We stop and buy plums. Aladar shouts out of the rolled-down car window, “Where are the Gypsies?” The old woman squints. “Where are the Gypsies?” repeats Aladar. She lowers her head and nods us onward. “The Gypsies are rich,” she says, before we pull away.
