Is a secret genocide taking place in the Czech Republic?

“Of course not,” says the government.

Photo by Laura Fuhrman on Unsplash

When Natasa Botosova was giving birth, they handed her “a blank paper to sign.”

“I was in a lot of pain so I did what they asked. After that I was anaesthetised and then they sterilised me. I only found out what had happened because afterwards there was a scar on my abdomen.”

Jirina Dzurkova had an ectopic pregnancy. At the hospital, she was told that she has to undergo urgent surgery. Sometime later, at a regular checkup with her doctor, he took a look at her medical file and said,

“I see you have been sterilized.”

Elena Gorolová was 21 when she was giving birth to her second son.

“My first child was delivered by C-section and the doctor told me I would need another one. Nobody said anything about sterilization.”

And yet, after she woke up from the C-section she was told by the doctor that she had also been sterilized.

All these cases, and many more like them, took place a few decades ago in the Czech Republic.

The question is not whether it happened. We know it did. The question is, does it continue to happen?

To answer this, first let’s look at what do these women — who were all sterilized against their will — have in common.

Hello there, racism. So we meet again.

Forced sterilization started taking place in the 1970s, back in what used to be Czechoslovakia. Communism fell, the country split in two, but the sterilizations continued to happen.

Why?

Because the true reason they happened — namely, gnawing hatred — doesn’t live and die by political regimes. Instead, it underpins and outlives them.

In the 1970s, Czechoslovakia embraced eugenics just like neighboring Germany had 40 years earlier. The country believed that its bright future can only be guaranteed by the beautiful, white, ethnical Czechoslovakians — and anyone else was an impediment and a parasite.

So, the government launched a program targeting the largest minority in the country — the Roma population.

Romani women were approached by social workers and offered money in exchange for undergoing sterilization. They were told the procedure only lasts “for five years” and that all the other women in the community have done it. The ones who declined were threatened that their children would be taken away. Or that their husbands would lose their jobs.

Roma women were most frequently targeted in the vulnerable moment just before or during birth. While in a state of pain or confusion, under influence of medication, or under threat of health complications, they were forced to sign papers — consenting, without their knowledge, to be sterilized. Doctors and nurses didn’t even bother doing that much with many women but simply went ahead with the procedure and afterward either informed the mother or left her to find out on her own.

This campaign was just one piece of a larger anti-Roma puzzle. There was “a wider social narrative to “discriminate, seclude and eradicate” the Roma population” in Czechoslovakia that also poisoned education, the job market, and housing for the Romani.

But Czechoslovakia was not unique in this endeavor.