Pandemic policing: ‘business as usual’

The danger for marginalized Romani communities was highlighted by Marija Pejčinović Burić, Council of Europe Secretary General, who expressed concern at measures “that could result in further compromising the human rights of Roma and hampering their equitable access to the provision of basic public services, most importantly health care, sanitation, and even fresh water”; and her worry that “some politicians blame Roma for the spread of the virus”proved to be well-founded.

It is worth noting that the surge in anti-Roma racism and incidents of police brutality during the worst of the pandemic marked a continuity with, rather than a departure from ‘normal practice’. But emergency measures carry added perils. UN experts have warned of the dangers of executive overreach in a state of exception, and the tendency for extraordinary powers to become part of the ordinary, normal legal system, moves which render the protection of rights “increasingly fraught and difficult.”  

The reports of police brutality, acts of discrimination and hate speech against Roma that ERRC receives week after week suggest that the situation has become even more fraught, difficult and downright dangerous. The death of the Stanislav Tomáš, while being restrained by police in the Czech town of Teplice provided a tragic reminder of just how dangerous. The death of this Romani man under the knee of a police officer must be a wake-up call to European and national authorities that they need to get serious about access to justice for Roma, that ‘Roma lives matter’ and law enforcement agencies across Europe must be held accountable for their racist misdeeds. 

It was on 21. October 1981 when a fight broke out in a bar, involving Roma. This incident was used as a pretext to attack the whole Roma community in the town. During the pogrom people were beaten, houses or cars were set on fire, cars were pushed into the river and property was destroyed.

My father remembers these days: On my way home after a date, I was driving downhill by the castle. I could see that something is on fire. I passed a friend who told me: Romek, you’ve got to run away! I didn’t listen to him. I could see huge flames where my house is. A lot of people gathered. I drove up to the crowd. Someone hollers: That Gipsy is here! So I turn back and I try to get to my house from Górnicki Street on the other side. On my way there, I saw a civic militia officer I know: “Romek, you must get out of there!”

I asked him, what happened to mum and dad. He told me: “Nothing, just run”.

I could not run, I had to find out what happened to the others. The officer said: “I am coming with you.” He got in my car and we were turning into Berka Street. There was a crowd there as well. The crowd was moving on, demolishing apartments. The officer was scared: “I get out”. I looked into the mirror and told him to stay, since they were also approaching from behind and began to surrounding us. I turned on the lights and tried to drive off. I was yelling “Get out of the way, I am leaving.” But they just stood there. I was so terrified. They could have killed me, lynch me. I closed my eyes and I opened them again. I did not recall that drive. The windshield wipers ripped out. But I was alive. I went to No.8 Stolarska Street. The crowd there was screaming: “Let’s burn this down! Let’s burn the Gypsy kids at the stake!” They sang songs and the Polish national anthem. The civic militia was fighting with them and if it would not have been for the militia officers, all the Roma in Oświęcim would have been burnt to death.   

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I spotted some friends in the crowd. I approached one of them. “How could you? My mum liked you, you helped us and we helped you.” We got into an argument. Then I asked another one: “We ate from the same plate”. He shoved me off.

Most Roma were hiding in the woods next to the nearby town of Bobrek. My father, I and some more people stayed in the city. The following day, the police took us to their headquarters. We went on foot with them escorting us. People were staring at us like ravenous lions. At the police headquarters they told us that neither the civil militia, nor the authorities nor the party want “Gypsies” in Oświęcim. We must leave. If we stay, they would wash their hands of us.

In the meantime, inhabitants of the town had established a “Committee for the expulsion of Gypsies”. The authorities supported this postulate. First, the Roma were offered apartments in so-called barracks in Bielsko-Biała, located several dozen kilometers from Oświęcim. Roma were afraid to go there, since there was violence against the Roma also in other parts of Poland.

However, the authorities wanted the Roma not only to leave Oświęcim, but Poland and so they  opened up the opportunity for Roma to leave the country and many decided to move to  Sweden. However, they were also betrayed by the authorities who didn’t give them passports but only “travel documents” with no possibility of return.

My father remembers: “They handed us one-way tickets. On them, it said that we were not citizens of the People’s Republic of Poland anymore. I reached Lund in Sweden on the 13. December 1981. In Poland they declared Martial law on that day”.

Today, most of these Roma live in Sweden. Some decided to return to Poland. My father is among of them.

M.G. tells us about an incident. She was in the emergency room with her 5 year old granddaughter because she had a high fever and the father, the girl and herself were in the room. The nurse put the thermometer on the child and told the adults that when the thermometer beeped, to take it off and that the doctor would be there shortly.

M.G. tells how it went on: “After five minutes the doctor came by and with an arrogant and overbearing attitude shouted at us, in front of the girl, saying what we were doing and why we had taken the thermometer away”. M.G. and her son-in-law told the doctor that this is what the nurse told them and the doctor continued shouting at them and told them that they didn’t know anything and that it was always the same with the gypsies. M.G. did not shut up and told the doctor that she should be treated with dignity and that if she continued in this vein, she would report her.

It is “the mere presence of Roma bothers them and they immediately send you to the security guard”. Hospital rooms are usually two-bedded, i.e. for two patients, and a maximum of two people per patient can stay as visitors. M.G. explains that she was in the hospital with a cousin and that in the bed next to her, a non-Roma woman, there were four people visiting and that nobody said anything to them. But they were called to her attention because they were two people and there were many people in the room.

M.G. says that she does not keep quiet because she more or less knows her rights and that if she does not, she asks. But most Roma who are treated inhumanely keep quiet because they either don’t know their rights or don’t want the patient to be treated badly. They feel powerless in the face of the hierarchy of power that professionals exercise over them. Roma perceive that if you complain, they accuse you of bad behaviour and intimidate you by saying that they will call the hospital security or the police and that they will throw you out of the hospital.

M.G. does not want to generalise about all health professionals and say that they all have anti-Roma behaviour, but as most of them have a great lack of knowledge of Roma culture and have believed all the stereotypes about Roma, in some way their treatment of Roma is different. She adds that even those professionals who do not have bad intentions have attitudes and explains how a nurse said to her cousin: “we are going to put someone like you as a roommate” and to which the cousin replied “like me? What do you mean, gypsy? And the nurse said: “Yes, gypsy. That way you understand each other better. The other gypsy turned out to be a cousin and, although they thought “better together”, they understood that this attitude on the part of the nurse was also anti-Gypsy.

In hospitals, anti-Gypsyism does not only come from health professionals or security guards, the other non-Roma patients, in most cases, also have an antigypsyistic attitude. Most of them express their discontent when they have to share a room with a Roma person and how they hide all their belongings because they think they are going to be robbed. Or when you are in the waiting room and you sit next to a non-Roma, they change their seat or hold their bag.

M.G. advocates for the right to quality health care on an equal footing with other citizens. She says that health care is public and universal and that Roma also pay their social security, thus contributing to the free health care system. The antigypsyism that Roma suffer in hospitals is not only in the treatment but also in the medical check-up and diagnosis. M.G. stresses that it depends on how lucky you are with the professional on duty, but that the position of power is reflected as soon as they recognise a Roma person as a patient.

Shortly after Angelo’s assassination, the idea of a march came immediately, it seemed obvious to us that we had to speak out in the street. It was a Saturday afternoon in the centre of Blois, twenty-two days after Angelo’s death. We marched to demand the indictment of the GIGN men and to denounce the lies of the state. For me, as for many of the Travellers present, it was the first march of our lives. All the children were there, Angelo’s, mine, their cousins. We were all wearing the black T-shirts provided by the Voice of the Roma with the inscription “Justice and Truth for Angelo”. Raymond Gurême, who was one of the last survivors of the internment of gens du voyage in France during the Second World War, was present, as were other activists. Buoyed by this collective strength, I could finally shout our truth to the world: they executed Angelo Garand, like so many others whom they did not consider worthy of living. Some time later, we founded the collective Justice for Angelo with associative and anti-racist militants, in order to unite our forces in this fight. It was with this collective that we organised the following marches in Blois, which often took place on 30 March, to commemorate the death of my brother.

Three months after my brother’s murder, I went to Paris for the big march commemorating the tenth anniversary of Lamine Dieng’s death. Lamine was twenty-five years old when he died of suffocation in a police van in Paris on 17 June 2017. For thirty minutes, he was tackled on his stomach, crushed under the weight of five police officers, handcuffs on his back and his feet strapped. As with my brother, the court dismissed the case. When I arrived at the rally that day, I found several sisters of victims. We recognize each other. We all hug each other, they cry for Angelo with me. We cry together, for our brothers, it is strong and it feels good. We carry the same pain, the same demands, the same violence inside us. When we start marching, I start shouting: “When we march for one, we march for all”. I noticed that day that it was mainly women who mobilised. We all go through the same problems: endless procedures, arbitrary court decisions, killers who get away without even having to explain themselves in a public trial… So we know that when it’s over for the justice system, it will never really be over for us; we have to keep fighting for those who are still alive, because it can’t go on like this. All these encounters and the power of this march convinced me that I was not crazy, that I was not alone, and that we were right to fight and to demand accountability. With the Blacks, the Arabs, the Roma… all of us! All discriminated communities. For us, there is no freedom or equality, only fraternity. Since they did that to us, I really became aware that I was a ‘racialised’ person, like the Blacks, the Arabs, the Asians…

For centuries, Travellers have been labelled: lazy, unsocial, thieves, violent, welfare scroungers, liars… We are suspected in advance. Because of this we cannot defend ourselves. And because of that you die. My brother was shot because in their eyes he was just a “gypsy on the run”, to use the expression used by the media after his murder. His origin was enough to make him a threat to society and his death is a sad example of the inequality of life. This was also proven by the judicial process that led to the dismissal of the gendarmes’ case: not all individuals are treated equally and not all words have the same value, especially when gendarmes are involved and also when the complainants or the accused are Travellers. When the case is dismissed by the courts in 2019 (which means that the gendarmes who killed my brother will never be prosecuted) the French state assumes: yes, it was our agents who killed Angelo Garand and yes, it is completely legal. The justice system used an article of the “Internal Security Law” of 2017 to say that the gendarmes had had the right reaction to “the danger of death or serious physical harm” that my brother represented. One man alone facing 5 armed gendarmes specialised in the fight against terrorism… This is the first time that this new article of law, article L435-1, has been used to justify a dismissal. This article represents a real licence to kill for the police, and it has been used since Angelo’s death on many occasions to justify crimes committed by the police.

When we were able to access the file on my brother’s death, the first things we discovered were photos of Angelo’s body lying on his back, his knife next to his right hand, his chest riddled with five bullets. To make it look like Angelo was a real danger to them, they had to invent a weapon. It was never denied that he had a penknife on him, we all carry one in the family, but there were no fingerprints on his knife, only his DNA – which proves that he didn’t have it in his hand when they shot. The only explanation for the presence of the knife in the photo is that after they killed my brother, they searched him, found his penknife and then opened it and placed it in the extension of his arm, to make it look like my brother had attacked them with his knife. This knife allowed the gendarmes to say that they had acted in self-defence, thus saving them from going to court.

I came to accept that I would never be able to look into the eyes of those who targeted Angelo’s heart and that I would never be able to hear the truth coming out of a courtroom. We had to look for the answers on our own, but we couldn’t do it alone. On 30 March this year, GENI, an independent counter-investigation group that works on state violence, released a video with its findings on my brother’s death. Based on concrete elements, and in particular ballistic reports, they managed to demonstrate in a detailed 3D reconstruction what really happened in the shed: Angelo was never a threat to the police and the latter were not in self-defence. We know that the French justice system will never admit the truth and this is why we have taken the case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). We hope that a court will finally say: Angelo Garand should have lived, the French state agents had no right to execute him for nothing, their statements are false, the state is guilty. I will continue to fight as long as it takes, so that justice is finally done for my brother Angelo and for all the victims of police violence, for all those people who can be killed with impunity just because of their origins.