Thirty Years on from the Velvet Revolution: Minorities and Changes

At the urging of her friends from the “We Are Fair” (Jsme fér) movement, Adéla Horáková left her successfully launched career as a top attorney in 2014 and began to dedicate herself to LGBT activism. In the Czech lands she supports marriage equality for gays and lesbians. Politicians comprehend this issue as a question of values, but they are out of step with the attitude of most Czechs on this issue, who approve of marriage equality, according to public opinion polls.  Probably the most prominent difference can be seen among Christian Democratic voters, who are far more liberal than political representatives of that party or church representatives.

Slavko Ševčík, a person who contracted polio and lives with a physical disability today, tells us how easy it is to end up homeless today. In the hurried days of the 1990s, when all of society was full of dreams about getting rich quick – and full of traps – those who were less aggressive or assertive were at a great disadvantage. Fortunately, Slavko only had to sleep outdoors for just a couple of months, but he says it that if he had been forced to live that way longer, he might never have returned to living among “normal” people.    

Samira Sibai, an activist and doctor of Czech-Syrian origin: “We arrived here in mid-1990, euphoria reigned in the Czech lands, everybody was smiling at each other in the streets, nobody knew exactly what they were meant to do now.”  She began to perceive a change for the worse for her own community after the “migration crisis” erupted. “The biggest hysteria broke out around the year 2015. The difference was enormous. Czechs knew the Arab world, at the very most, indirectly, through Angelika [translator’s note: A 14-volume French novel series translated into Czech, set in the 17th century, and including an episode where the title character ends up in the harem of a Moroccan sultan]. Sibai and her friends from the community of ethnic Syrians have been doing their best to explain that they do not pose a danger to Czech society and that this their home too. “It was impossible to discuss these issues with people here, though, so the Czech-Syrian volunteers stopped trying. This is an evil against which it is impossible for us to defend ourselves. My grandmother told me that she had experienced the same mobilization against Jewish people under Hitler.”  

Fedor Gál, a Jewish writer from Slovakia, author and politician: “I feel like I am a minority member in Prague, because I live in the Žižkov quarter. I feel like a minority politically, because whenever I’ve gotten politically involved, I’ve been smeared. Most frequently, however, I’ve been confronted with my Jewishness.” Antisemitism is strongly rooted in society. “The show trials in the 1950s had a distinct antisemitic subtext – take the Slánský trial. Accusations of Zionism were one of the key charges, and of the 11 people executed, I believe nine were Jews.”   He assesses the transition to democracy after the fall of communism as follows: “After 1989, the lid came off the pressure cooker – it’s not true that suddenly we began to hate Gypsies and Jews. People were disoriented, frightened.”