Included through Exclusion: Discourses on "Gypsies" in Interwar Czechoslovakia and the Case of Anti-Gypsy Violence in Pobedim 1928
Abstract
In 1927, Czechoslovakia adopted the Act No. 117/1927 on Wandering Gypsies and Other Itinerants. The main reason for adoption of such a special law, which even its creators considered a legal exception, was an alleged case of cannibalism from 1927 that took place in Moldava nad Bodvou.
The accused were members of a "Gypsy criminal gang". News about this case, spread across Europe by Czechoslovak and especially European media, allowed the Czechoslovak government to enforce the law, even though it was actually in conflict with international treaties on minority rights.
A year later, a group of peasants, including a local mayor, attacked a Roma settlement at the outskirts of the village of Pobedim. Attackers killed 6and wounded 18 Roma and they razed the whole settlement to the ground.
Almost without any media attention, the court sentenced four attackers to two years in prison and to compensation for the damage. Firstly, I will focus on the development of anti-gypsy measures that were enforced in Europe and especially in the Czech lands at the turn of the 19th and 20th century.
I will outline the connection between anti-gypsy policies and the notion of the liberal Rechtstaat, nascent social policies, restrictions of wandering professions and police enforcement of measures against vagrancy and beggary. Mainly, I will draw attention to the way "Gypsies" were entangled in these discourses (or included through exclusion, as it was put by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben).
Roma were described as those who allegedly placed themselves outside the law by their own actions (their way of life, criminality, cultural or even racial differences), therefore it was necessary to put exclude them into legal exception - the state of exception - outside the principle of equality before the law. In the last section of my paper, I will analyse a particular case of anti-gypsy violence.