Eastern Europe's reaction to BLM movement
Racism, police brutality, reaction across Central/Eastern Europe to protests in US
Welcome back to another edition of “From Russia With Mila.” The tragic deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd join a disturbingly long, exhausting list of black men and women killed by US police officers, continuing to shed light on police brutality and systemic racism.
Protests against police brutality and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement continue across the US, which has already led to police reform in various cities, from banning chokeholds to limiting funding for coming years. Demonstrations in cities all across the globe have also taken place. You may have heard about or seen pictures from protests in London and Paris — where a march was organized by supporters of Adama Traore, who died in the custody of French police in 2016 —, but what is going on in Central and Eastern Europe?
The trending Russian Lives Matter hashtag
While Black Lives Matter protests are also happening in cities in Central and Eastern Europe, some Russian Alt-Right groups are taking advantage of and appropriating BLM terminology. Meduza in English breaks down the Russian response in a podcast.
The movement has attracted attention in Russia, as well, where the state media has geopolitical reasons to highlight how the United States is a racist and failed democracy, and where many anti-Kremlin, typically Western-leaning oppositionists look to places like the United States as an example for better governance and civil society. In other words, they’re watching the U.S. from Russia, and Black Lives Matter is now front and center.
BLM messaging has become manipulated by Russian Alt-Right groups, “both cynically for publicity and deliberately in order to diminish what they’ve described as a divisive leftist upheaval,” according to Meduza. Here is another English-language podcast that unpacks this more.
Meduza’s podcasts touch on the Russian libertarian-created “Russian Lives Matter” slogan, and here is an article about the police brutality in Yekaterinburg that birthed this idea. Libertarian Party member and “Civil Society” movement head Mikhail Svetov started getting the Russian Lives Matter hashtag trending on Twitter:
On June 12, UK-based political website openDemocracy published an opinion essay on why Russians are “so angered by America’s latest protests,” referencing previously published articles in Russian media and discussing “the imaginary West” being “undermined” by inequality and protests:
This imaginary West has been undermined in recent years by the disturbing reality of deepening inequality in western societies and the rise of extra-parliamentary protest movements on both the right and the left. America is at the heart of the imaginary West; it may as well be the centre of the cosmos, home to the ideal order of things, around which the rest of this imperfect world inevitably revolves.
Perhaps it’s not so much about the West being “imaginary,” but the protests exposing the systemic racism that makes up what the “Russian liberals” desire as the ideal West and disrupting the “ideal order of things.”
Former Russian presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak posted this image on Instagram, with the caption “I am categorically against racism, police brutality, and any form of discrimination. But…” and then expresses disgust at stores and businesses (specifically, Louis Vuitton in Los Angeles) getting looted.
Robin DiAngelo explains in White Fragility that racism is reinforced when white people — including Europeans — prevent it from being challenged, examined and addressed. For instance, DiAngelo led a workshop and came across a 23-year-old woman who was raised in a German town with no black people, where the ideas of race was not taught to her, and therefore she argued she could not be racist. She said she had never seen a black person until “the American soldiers came,” and then “all the German women thought them so beautiful that they wanted to connect with them.” When DiAngelo asked if she had perhaps picked up racist ideas from American movies or messages she had received in childhood about people in Africa. The woman became upset, telling DiAngelo that she did not “feel seen.”
From the White Fragility reading guide: “the dynamics of white fragility are familiar in all societies in which white people hold institutional power and/or have a white settler colonial history, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and South Africa.”
BLM protests, institutionalized discrimination in the Czech Republic
Multiple protests in solidarity with the BLM movement in the US occurred in Prague, with chants of “Black Lives Matter,” “No Justice No Peace” and “No Trump, No KKK, No fascist U.S.A.” The protest was organized by “an informal group of Americans living in Prague, along with several Czech groups,” according to the Chicago Tribune.
Picture by Raymond Johnston (Prague’s Old Town Square)
Some regional activists and academics like Jakub Janda, Head of Kremlin Watch Program and Deputy Director at the European Values Think-Tank based in Prague, see the US protests as an opportunity to highlight issues they feel need attention in their own regions:
Commenting on “debating race issues” as being something that only happens in the US — or that is a uniquely American problem —, seems to be a common theme. However, institutionalized prejudice and racism is of course not unique to the US.
In the Czech Republic, which is among the most ethnically homogeneous countries in Europe, Romani children are discriminated against in the education system, where schools are still segregated and Romani children are placed in separate Roma-only classes or in schools for Czech students with “mild mental disabilities.” Romani students in non-segregated schools experience harassment and bullying.
“The widespread segregation of Romani children is a horrifying example of systematic prejudice, with schools introducing children to bitter discrimination at an early age,” said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.
“By failing to properly address this issue for years the Czech government is not only breaching European Union and human rights law but is restricting the life chances of tens of thousands of Czech citizens. Let’s call this what it is: racism, pure and simple.” (Amnesty International report)
Czech activism organization ROMEA publishes news and information “to increase awareness among both the majority society and Romani people themselves and thereby improve relations between them.”
In 2018, Czech President Miloš Zeman said that while he was no fan of communism, at least under that system “the Roma were forced to work,” according to Radio Prague International. This prompted a response on social media of thousands of Romani people posting pictures of themselves at their jobs, to which Zeman said he was happy to have “received photos from some of the 10 percent of Roma who work.”
There are no statistics to support the president’s assertion, and an annual report on the Roma approved by the Czech government stated that “as of the end of 2017, there were roughly 240,000 Roma living in the Czech Republic, or about two percent of the population. Half of the 240,000 were estimated to be ‘socially excluded’” (Reuters).
The report also stated that the Roma population faces strong obstacles in social life, mainly due to prejudice which often prevents its members from getting a job or suitable dwelling. (Reuters)
The European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) wrote an open letter to Zeman, calling out the president’s comments about Roma as racist.
The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) said in 2015 “by attempting to justify prejudice and intolerance against Roma, it perpetuates and increases them” when Zeman began using the term “inadaptables” to talk about Roma.
Reach out with any questions or comments, connect on Twitter for the latest, and stop back for more on media and Eastern Europe!
— Мила (Mila)