Tech & Rights

Stop Funding the Pig Farm on a Roma Genocide Site in Czechia!

Subsidies from the European Union are keeping the pig farm at the Lety concentration camp, where hundreds of Roma were murdered during World War II, in business.

by The League of Human Rights
Activists, holding pictures of victims of the Holocaust, stand in front of the pig farm on the site of the former Lety concentration camp. (REUTERS/David W Cerny)
Czech activists are demanding that the EU stops subsidies for a company operating a pig farm on the site of the former concentration camp for Roma near Lety u Pisku.

The activists say the farm should be closed and a memorial to Roma victims of the Holocaust built on the site instead.

"Solving the current scandalous situation could be very easy. We discovered that the pig farm on the Roma genocide site is a recipient of EU farm subsidies. Without these subsidies, it would be loss-making and fail in a short time," said Miroslav Brož from the Roma organization Konexe.

According to Jan Michal, head of the European Commission Representation in Czechia, it is clearly a sensitive issue, but dealing with the past is a matter for each country.

"The European Commission manages the common agricultural policy; the individual beneficiaries, however, are determined by each member state," he wrote in response.

A man places a picture of a Roma victim of the Holocaust on the fence of the pig farm at the Lety concentration camp site.  (REUTERS/David W Cerny)

Empty words

Activists working to close the farm are used to empty words from politicians.

"There was never the slightest real political will to [buy and tear down the farm]. Former promises, in our opinion, served only to reassure the international human rights community," said Brož.

The large feedlot was built in Lety in 1973. After the fall of the communist regime, it was acquired by a privately held company.

Czechia has faced long-standing criticism from international institutions for placing a pig farm on a memorial site. Successive governments attempted to find a solution, including many statements that the state would buy the farm and tear it down. According to estimates, the cost would reach hundreds of millions of Czech crowns.

According to a census, about 6,500 Roma and mixed-blood Romani were living in the former Nazi protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. After the war, fewer than 600 returned from the concentration camps, and experts estimate that the Nazis murdered up to 90 percent of the pre-war local Roma population.

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