Baloh, a Roma woman, was taken to prison along with other mostly Roma families, while tens of thousands of other Ukrainian refugees found places to stay in private homes and dormitories in the Czech Republic. “It was like a prison. It was bad. I was scared there, there were so many people, so many scary people,” she told CNN. Hers is a common story, according to NGOs and activists. “Roma refugees are automatically placed in non-standard accommodation,” says Patrik Priesol, head of the Ukraine program at Romodrom, a Czech NGO focused on Roma rights and advocacy. “It’s very sad and I’m not afraid to say it amounts to institutional racism and segregation.” The Czech Republic has taken in more than 400,000 refugees from Ukraine since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of the country in late February. The Czech government passed an EU-wide law allowing refugees leaving Ukraine to apply for temporary protection status, access healthcare and start working in the bloc. In a statement emailed to CNN, the country’s police headquarters said nationality does not play a role in the application process. “We don’t look at the nationality of the applicants, only their citizenship,” a spokesman for the Czech police headquarters told CNN. Russia’s war in Ukraine has sparked a massive wave of solidarity across Europe, with governments and individuals rushing to offer aid to those fleeing the conflict. The UN believes more than 6.3 million Ukrainians have fled their country, although some have since returned. But the crisis has also revealed an ugly truth: that in many places, Roma are simply not welcome. CNN visited shelters and spoke with a number of refugees, social workers and activists in the Czech Republic, Romania and Moldova. In all three countries, the problems faced by Roma refugees are unimaginably similar. Roma refugees from Ukraine are often accused of not being Ukrainian. divided into low quality accommodation. According to several NGOs, many are given misleading information about their rights. and easily resolved issues faced by others who have left Ukraine — such as the lack of passport stamps — are often used as a reason to deter them. Reports from human rights groups in Poland, Slovakia and Hungary show that such discrimination is common across Eastern Europe. Romanian Roma rights activist Nicu Dumitru told CNN the refugee crisis has shed light on the kind of hostility Roma still face in Europe. “Discrimination against black people or gay people is becoming less acceptable in Europe, or at least people are restrained from doing it in public. This is not the case with the Roma, who are probably the last group of people still discriminated against in Europe,” he told CNN. Roma communities have faced persecution and discrimination in Europe since they first came to the continent from India hundreds of years ago and were persecuted during the Holocaust. About 90% live below the poverty line, according to the European Union’s Organization for Fundamental Human Rights. Dumitru works for Aresel, a Bucharest-based Roma education initiative that turned its focus to refugees who left Ukraine earlier this year after receiving multiple reports of discrimination. He said a turning point for the organization came in April, when a large group of Roma refugees complained they were denied humanitarian meals at an aid point in Bucharest. “They were kicked out because they were ‘too many’ and ‘too strong’ and people said, ‘You’re not Ukrainian, you’re Roma, leave,’” Dumytro said. ADRA, the group that distributes the meals, told CNN that the incident, which was caught on camera, “had been taken out of context and led to the idea of discrimination and intolerance against Roma”. He said the Roma group had been prevented because it was mainly made up of men but was in an area reserved for mothers and children, adding that it has zero tolerance for any kind of discrimination. “The group left the room after an announcement by another person, not connected to ADRA,” ADRA’s response said, adding that other Roma groups from Ukraine were at the center. The Bucharest Municipal Emergency Coordination Center told CNN that it provides humanitarian aid “without discrimination” and added that it “has not received any reports of discrimination in the delivery of aid.” Across the border in Moldova, Roma mediator and journalist Elena Sirbu said she too was horrified to see what was happening in one of the refugee centers in Moldova’s capital, Chisinau. Sirbu said she was initially asked by authorities to help “handle” the situation, but instead became an advocate for Roma refugees after seeing discrimination firsthand. “When I saw the ignorance and the attitude… these people fled the war, they come here, it was cold outside, some of the children didn’t have winter shoes and they asked for a cup of tea or [diapers], and Moldovan authorities told them to leave, accusing them of not being refugees and saying “we want normal people,” he told CNN. “And this was happening in front of me. How do you think I should act?’ The Moldovan government’s Crisis Management Center (CUGC), which is responsible for shelters, said shelters must “comply with the principle of non-discrimination at all stages of service provision and promote and respect human rights , regardless of race, skin color, nationality, ethnicity’. The CUGC “continually consults with Roma refugees about their specific needs,” he told CNN, and “imposes measures to combat discriminatory attitudes against refugees, particularly the Roma group.”
There is no home to return to
Like many Roma refugees, Luisa Balloch and her children, aged between nine months and 11 years, have fallen through the cracks of the system.
She told CNN that the Czech detention center she and her children were sent to was so terrifying that she decided to leave. The family ended up camping in Prague’s central train station along with hundreds of other, mostly Roma refugees. Authorities told her she was no longer eligible for help because she had “rejected” the accommodation she had been offered.
Prisol said this was a common scenario and that miscommunication is often to blame. “Some of these people are functionally illiterate, post-traumatic, and they’re offered a place in a detention center that’s been temporarily turned into a shelter and they’re told ‘this prison here is your home now. ‘” he said.
“They do not understand the serious consequences of their decision to refuse the offer,” he added.
Baloh eventually ended up in one of two makeshift refugee camps on the outskirts of Prague, which have since merged into one.
Camp officials say it’s a place where authorities send people they say don’t qualify for help. The Czech government said people who do not receive temporary protection status can stay for a few days and then leave the country.
Conditions at the camp, which CNN had access to from authorities, were basic: Large military-style tents surround a square partially shaded by gazebos. There are portable toilets and mobile shower units and meals are served three times a day. Most of the residents are Roma and many come from some of the poorest regions of Ukraine.
Nikol Hladikova, the social worker in charge of the camp, heads the humanitarian aid department at the Prague Center for Social Services, a municipal agency. He was involved in dealing with the refugee crisis from the beginning and confirmed Baloh’s description of the conditions in the detention facilities.
“My first visit to one of them, we came with a bus full of refugees and I turned the bus back because the situation there was absolutely horrible,” he told CNN. “There was dirt and faeces everywhere, no kettle to boil water and we had a one-month-old baby with us.”
Hladikova said conditions at the facility had improved after she and her colleagues raised concerns about them.
The separation is “not intentional,” authorities say
Lida Kalyshinko fled her home in the Odessa region, near the Ukrainian-Moldovan border, with her family after the outbreak of war. She, her daughter and two granddaughters have spent the past three months in an abandoned university building in Chisinau that has been turned into a refugee shelter.
The building houses more than 100 refugees, almost all Roma. The few non-Roma are mostly citizens of post-Soviet countries in Central and West Asia, including Tajikistan and Azerbaijan.
A single drinking water tap serves the entire building and the discarded furniture clutters the dark corridors where small children roam. At the time of CNN’s visit in mid-July, several cases of Covid-19 had been reported among residents.
Standing outside the large, gray building, Kalyshinko pointed to a mobile shower unit provided by UNICEF. The facility was of little use to her granddaughter, who uses a wheelchair, she said. “She’s only showered four times since she came here because it’s so hard to get her there, there are so many steps and the showers aren’t handicapped accessible.”
The Moldovan government’s Crisis Management Center (CUGC), which is in charge of the shelter, told CNN it was trying to improve conditions there by trying to bring hot water to the building. Once that is done, shower facilities will be set up on each floor, he said.
In a written response to questions from CNN, the CUGC denied that it had deliberately segregated Roma refugees in the shelter, saying they had been placed there to avoid divisive…
