Slovenian party pushing for free kindergartens as costs rise
15.9.2006 - Michael Manske

Around Europe children have been returning back to school recently. Many parents in Slovenia are unhappy with the relatively high kindergarten costs. Now, one political party is seeking to take advantage of parents' dissatisfaction, and bring the issue to parliament. Michael Manske of Radio Slovenia International has the story.

On the first of September, Slovenian schools opened their doors again. But along with grumbling children, some parents were also grumbling - especially those with children going to kindergarten. Fees for the early school years are scaled to income, and are reportedly higher in Slovenia than in comparable countries. In Slovenia, parents currently pay about 35% of the total kindergarten fees.

The Youth Party of Slovenia, the SMS, has now launched an attempt to get free kindergarten for all children in the country. The party is already at work collecting the necessary signatures to force the government to debate the issue.

SMS Party president Darko Krajnc:

"We put in the law proposition to the parliament. And now we have to collect 5000 signatures in the official way and so this is going to the parliament and then they will create a new law - with our help, I believe."

According to the SMS party, the proposal wants to ensure "equal opportunities for all children regardless of the social status of their parents."

Part of what makes kindergartens different from other schools is that they are in the domain of the local municipalities. The SMS believes that this is a big part of the problem. Darko Krajnc on the role of local governments:

"They have to work, they have to settle the price, they have to make investments and the state is only telling the causes, but they don't pay anything. So these local governments want parents to pay more, and this is the problem."

Kindergartens have also generated controversy because many wealthier parents in Slovenia have tried to skirt the laws in order to pay as little as possible. Whether kidnergartens now get renewed attention from parliament remains to be seen.

New EU states react angrily to delay in Schengen enlargement
15.9.2006 - Genie Johnson

Central European states which joined the EU in 2004 are hopping mad at delays in extending border-less travel - what's known as the Schengen zone - to include them. It was meant to happen next year but Brussels says technical and legal problems will push the date back to 2008. Some states see political - not technical - reasons for the delay. Genie Johnson reports from Vienna.

People living inside Europe's Schengen zone can cross national borders without stopping and without showing passports. Europeans outside that zone - including the ten countries which joined the block more than two years ago - still have to endure checks. And people trying to visit them from within Schengen are also subject to border delays. Foreign ministers from five Central European countries met in Vienna this week - among them Hungarian foreign minister Kinga Goncz. She said Hungary would be ready on time and so should Europe.

"We will be prepared by the give deadline with all preparation for joining the Schengen zone. And we also mention that it goes beyond a question of infomatics... it is much more a political question... much more a confidence question."

The European Commission says the original October 2007 date is unrealistic. There have been delays in building the system which stores data on stolen vehicles and wanted persons. But Slovakia's Foreign Minister Jan Kubis - says any delay is unacceptable. And suggests some European countries want to delay opening up borders to the east.

"This is not a technical issue. We don't take a message from Brussels that for technical reasons there will be a postponement. For us there is a clear political commitment to our citizens that they can consume their rights as citizens of the European Union. And therefore we will insist on the deadlines as projected in the original plans and we consider that for our citizens there must be an opening to consume all the benefits of the Schengen system as planned in October 2007."

The ministers were in the Vienna for a Regional Partnership meeting. Their strong statements on open borders were directed at their Austrian hosts as much as Brussels. Austria, fearing a flood of cheap labour, has restrictions on worker movement from the former communist countries. Something that rankles with the Czech Republic's Foreign minister Alexsandr Vondra.

"You know the opening of the border is one of those few examples that we can show to the citzens that there are some real results. The explanation about the technical difficulties like the air-conditioning for the computers, in the age when we are sending rockets to the moon, is something that neither myself or the Czech people can understand."

Poland too was pushing for Europe to keep its promise of open borders by late next year. Deputy Foreign minister Barbara Tuge-Erecinska.

"We underlined once again our readiness and commitment to join the Schengen area in October 2007 as it was designed."

European Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini says he's doing his best to minimise the delay. But until Czech's, Poles, Hungarians and Slovaks can move around as freely as other Europeans - this will remain a sensitive issue. And any further delays will be viewed with suspicion Europe does not want to open its eastern borders.

Tensions remain as Hungarian student claims Slovak police pressured her into retracting story
15.9.2006 - Anca Dragu

Relations between Hungary and Slovakia have been strained to say the least lately, with tensions in large part sparked by a reported attack on a Hungarian student in Slovakia, after she was overheard speaking Hungarian on her mobile phone. In an unexpected turn, several weeks after the incident, Slovak officials announced the woman had admitted to inventing the story. But the student herself says Slovak police pressured her to say she had made the whole thing up. Radio Slovakia's Anca Dragu reports on this rather murky story.

On August the 25th Hedviga M.complained to the police that two men beat her in an apparent racist motivated attack. The 23 year old student said she was on her way to an exam and the two approached her when they heard her speaking in Hungarian. They allegedly shouted that she should speak only Slovak in Slovakia and began hitting her. They took her earrings and purse, and wrote "Hungarians should be thrown in the Danube" on her blouse. But on Tuesday the Minister of Interior, Robert Kalinak, presented a different version of the story.

"The police decided to close the enquiry because the girl lied. We have a graphologist's expert report proving that she herself wrote that slogan on the blouse, plus records from the phone company showing there were no phone calls from her mobile during the whole of the morning. She initially said she was attacked while speaking on her phone," said Kalinak during a press conference, which was also attended by the prime minister Robert Fico.

"Now you see how much energy the police had to invest in order to fight this attempt at manipulating public opinion. And all this for the sake of a girl who didn't study for her exam and was trying to find an excuse not to attend it. She put the Slovak state in a difficult situation. We were accused of nurturing extremism but there was no extremism involved in this case," said Fico.

The student, however, says her academic records can prove she is a good student. She appeared frail during a press conference at which she rejected the police report. She says she is seeing a psychiatrist who helps her remembering more details about the incident.

"I didn't lie. I was attacked and the medical records prove it. How can someone say that I inflicted the wounds myself? The policemen put pressure on me to admit that I made everything up but it's not true," said Hedviga.

Bela Bugar, the chairman of the coalition of ethnic Hungarian parties reacted to the police report by expressing his doubts about the fairness of the whole investigation. One of the party's MPs offered to be Hedviga's lawyer and tried to re-open the enquiry. Bugar, who was accused by the Slovak foreign minister of being involved in a campaign to discredit Slovakia abroad, says he has the feeling the police were under political pressure when solving the case.

"Prime Minister Fico was so quick to praise the police for closing the enquiry in record time, almost two weeks. He wasn't so fast when asked to publicly condemn extremism, though," said Bugar.

Political analysts are wondering what will be the impact of Hedviga's case on future relations between Slovaks and Hungarians in Slovakia. The incident was only one in a row of extremist displays on both sides in the past three months, including racist posters during football games and videos circulating on the internet.

Romany ghettos in the Czech Republic getting bigger, and more numerous
15.9.2006 -

Europe's Roma often live on the margins of society, suffering a variety of problems from high unemployment to relatively low life expectancy. In the Czech Republic a new report highlights what seems to be a disturbing trend - the creation of Roma ghettos. The study, ordered by a Czech government ministry, shows that more and more Romanies in the Czech Republic are finding themselves literally living on the edge of society. Radio Prague's Rob Cameron reports.

More and more Romanies are finding themselves pushed to the very margins of Czech society. The country's Labour and Social Affairs Ministry has just published the most in-depth study ever into what sociologists call social exclusion - in other words, the creation of ghettos. And the results do not make pleasant reading. The study was overseen by leading sociologist Ivan Gabal:

"Czech society and economy are undergoing a huge transformation, privatisation of housing, restructuring of the labour force. And in all of these advancing process, the Roma minority remains backward. So the relative distance between the Roma minority and Czech majority society has increased."

Ivan Gabal says his teams of sociologists found a total of 310 neighbourhoods inhabited almost exclusively by Romanies, usually run-down housing estates or ramshackle buildings on the edge of town. The study put the total population of these areas at 80,000 - that's around a third of the country's total Roma population. But the most alarming fact was that the number of ghettos is growing. One person who isn't surprised at the findings of the study is Gabriela Hrabanova, director of the Roma student organisation Athinganoi:

"It's terrible but what did people think the analysis would show? Because we are working in this kind of sector, the non-governmental sector dealing with Romani issues, we're facing this fact every day. In fact I'm happy that this analysis has been produced, because now it's on paper, and it's showing facts with graphs. And people can understand than just 'the situation is really bad'."

The study say the ghettos exert a powerful gravitational force; they tend to suck in poor families living on their margins. The bigger the ghetto, the more powerful the force. Inside the ghettos researchers found communities blighted by sub-standard housing, poor health and high employment - between 95 and 100 percent of the inhabitants were out of work.

It's a vicious circle - poor, badly-educated kids growing up into poor, badly-educated adults who then have more poor, badly-educated kids. Ivan Gabal says the Czech education system - wittingly or unwittingly - plays a major role in perpetuating the problem:

"Czech schools are simply legitimising the deficit of cultural and educational capital in the background. This is what we have to change. Czech elementary schools have to be able to resupply the insufficient educational background. This is not the current situation and a lot needs to be done in this field."

So how can the situation be improved? Cestmir Sajda, from the Labour and Social Affairs Ministry, says the study - the first complete map of Roma exclusion - is an important first step:

"I think every problem is serious. I don't think the problem of the Roma population is the biggest problem in the country, but of course we have to solve this problem and we would like to solve it. That's why we started to do a proper analysis to know the situation, and we've now fulfilled this target. The next thing is to decide what instruments are effective to diminish social exclusion."

As for concrete proposals, they vary from reforming the education system to introducing positive discrimination in the labour market. Such ideas are likely to meet with a hostile reaction among politicians and the Czech public, who on the whole have little patience or understanding for the Roma minority. Athinganoi's Gabriela Hrabanova concedes there are no easy solutions. But change, she says, must start at a grass roots level, and that means the local authorities:

"The responsibility for changing the situation lies with the local governmental representatives. They are the ones responsible for the region, and they are the ones who are actually sending the Roma out of the cities, or even to a different region so they don't need to deal with it anyone. We can see this from the past two years - it was really happening."

Festival recreates pre-war Jewish life in Warsaw
15.9.2006 - Michal Kubicki

A Jewish cultural festival held in the Polish capital Warsaw every September re-creates Jewish life in one street of the city's former ghetto. The festival is dedicated to Nobel Prize winner Issac Bashevis Singer, who began his career in Warsaw before emigrating to the US in the mid-1930s. Radio Polonia's Michal Kubicki reports.

The Festival's motto - 'Singer's Warsaw' - refers to the famous Nobel Prize winning writer Issac Bashevis Singer whose international career began in Warsaw and who until the end of his life was spiritually very close to the Polish capital, a city which before World War Two had the third largest Jewish community in the world. The first Festival of Jewish Culture, in 2004, marked the centenary of the writer's birth, and this year too Singer is one of the themes of the event.

Its programme comprises a wide range of theatre performances, presentations of Jewish arts and crafts, panel discussions, tours of the Warsaw Synagogue and other Jewish sites. Golda Tencer of the Shalom Foundation is the Director of the Festival.

'There will be lots of concerts, dance performances, replicas of pre-war Jewish shops and workshops, meetings with writers, vocal classes given by Jewish cantors, including Benzion Miller from New York and special attractions for children.'

Most of the Festival events take place in and around Prózna Street, once a centre of Jewish Warsaw, currently badly in need of thorough renovation.

This week Prozna Street has become alive again with innumerable events and tens of thousands of people taking a journey into the past and visiting Jewish workshops, restaurants and art galleries. Miriam Gonczarska of the Union of Jewish Communities in Poland is aware that pre-war Jewish Warsaw cannot be reconstructed.

'We have a deep sense of loss, of lost potential and of loss of Jewish community life which was incredible in Poland before World War Two. Warsaw had the third largest Jewish population. We cannot reconstruct all this but we can preserve the memory and we can try to continue some kind of activities but we will never be what we used to be before the war'.

There are precious few sites in Warsaw today that can remind of the city's pre-war Jewish population. The reconstructed Nozyk Synagogue is one of them. Miriam Gonczarska will be taking visitors around the synagogue this week and she is herself looking forward to a performance given there by Jewish cantors.

'It has a very unusual history. It was built over 100 years ago by Zalman Nozyk, who gave it as a kind of memorial to his wife and his whole family and in the 1930s his family gave it to the city's Jewish community. During the war the Nazis kept horses there. The present synagogue is on the same site and for Jewish religious singers it is always a great experience to sing there.'

One of the highlights of the festival is an exhibition of photographs 'And I Still See Their Faces'. It features photos documenting Jewish life in pre-war Poland; they had been sent to the organizers by anonymous people from all over the world.