COVID-19 Lockdown of Roma Villages Creates Unease in Slovakia

The villagers, most of whom are Roma, seem to pay little heed to this newly acquired public attention and have mostly already gone back to their daily routines.

But they are still trying to process their recent traumatic experience, after their village - and other four nearby Roma settlements - were placed under a police and army-imposed 16-day quarantine in the middle of the pandemic.

Bystrany's ordeal started on the morning of April 9. When the villagers woke up, they found themselves surrounded by the white and green police tape, police officers and Slovak army soldiers.

The lockdown had been imposed overnight, without any warning. Roman Pecha, a 51-year-old member of the local "watch" - tasked to tour the settlement and check if residents needed anything - had no idea what was coming.

"When I went to work that morning, the tape was already there and I wondered why we'd been put in lockdown," he said.

"I was told it was the decision of the main health authority because there was COVID-19 in Bystrany," he added. "We hadn't known."

Like most other locals, Pecha has mixed feelings about the quarantine and the way it was imposed. On the one hand, many people feel it provided them with additional protection from the coronavirus.

But they also remain disgruntled by the fact that, of all other local communities in the country, it was only Roma settlements that were placed under imposed lockdown.

Some 3,000 of the 3,500 people in the village of Bystrany are ethnic Roma. Many live and work abroad, most of them in Sheffield in the United Kingdom. When the pandemic started, a lot of families returned home.

When people returning to the settlement were tested for the virus, results showed that at least...