Archives for December 1st, 2006

“If you’re not good, we’ll give you to the Slovenes.” (Famous poster)

A lot of people have been sending me stories about the recent uproar over an evicted Gypsy family in Ambrus and wondering why I haven’t been mentioning it. After all it’s a big, big story; virtually every major news outlet abroad has written about it at this point, with Nicholas Wood of The New York Times leading the charge. (1, 2) (alternate links: 1, 2)

The first reason I’ve been avoiding it is because it’s so goddamn depressing and continues to get even more goddamn depressing with each passing day. The second is that there is so much to say that I don’t think I can manage to put everything together coherently. But I can try.

For those of you not familiar with the background here’s a quick summary: After years of tension, an angry mob in Ambrus tries to force a 30-member family of Gypsies out of their town. Fearing bloodshed, the government steps in and evacuates the Gypsies (mostly kids) to a run-down building in Postojna as a “temporary solution.” The interior minister unwittingly echoes Heinrich Himmler, by suggesting the Gypsies will be transported to some isolated place “in the woods” but with “access to a road” where they can carry on with their lifestyle unhindered. And, of course, this being Slovenia — where problems are never solved quickly but rather left to metastasize into far bigger problems — things have been going downhill ever since.

The EU promptly chided Slovenia, as did Amnesty International. The Left staged some protests. And the government was left playing a game of hot potato, where every community they suggested as a new home went berserk at the news. I mean, people were literally setting up barricades and taking to the streets at the mere mention of Gypsies coming to their neighborhood, and I’m not talking about remote villages: one possibility (dropped after two days of protests) was a suburb of cosmopolitan Ljubljana.

And so the government is now stuck, like the infamous New York garbage barge Mobro 4000, hoping against hope that someone will take their unwanted cargo, and refusing to recognize that there are no friendly ports in this vast ocean of NIMBYs. The saddest part is that I suspect they’d have an easier time getting Slovenes to accept a landfill near their house than a family of Roma.

That said, I don’t think the government is to blame for this. They’ve taken a lot of criticism, but they were forced to play their hand and their possibilities were limited from the start. The majority of the blame, I think, belongs squarely with the police. People like Slovenia’s ombudsman decry the fact that a mob in Ambrus took justice into its own hands, but don’t follow this to its logical conclusion: The mob took justice into its own hands because no one was holding it in the first place. When a gang of people want to use violence to solve problems, the police need to step in and, to quote Pengovsky and former chief of police Pavle ÄŒelik, “kick ass.” The police didn’t. As a matter of fact, their refusal to dispense ass-kickings is what helped Ambrus reach boiling point in the first place. There has been, by all accounts, tension brewing there for years. If some Gypsies were harassing people, the police should have been there to step in. If people were harassing Gypsies, the police should have been there to step in. Instead, the police let everyone take care of themselves and (surprise?) they did.

I regularly hear stories of police around Slovenia being scared of entering Gypsy areas. They seem to be averse to any potentially risky situations. Recently in Maribor, they famously didn’t come to the aid of some poor suckers who got jumped in the park by thugs. And I know that on the one occasion when I called them, they were bizarrely reluctant to come over.¹

The only area of justice the police seem committed to is issuing traffic tickets, which they do with gusto. So all this talk of educating Roma and educating tolerant Slovenes should instead focus on educating the police and having them enforce the rule of law. In other words, the folks manning the tanka modra Ä?rta (thin blue line) need higher salaries, better equipment, and a freer hand to intervene against the dark impulses of humanity.

You can probably tell by now that I have something of a Hobbesian outlook on life. But I think there’s a limit to how this problem can be solved — if it can be solved at all. I certainly don’t think there’s any hope in educating people to be more tolerant. Really none. The unfortunate truth is that people don’t want to live with people that are different from them. Not just in Slovenia, but everywhere. The reason that Europeans have been at peace after many centuries of violence is not because people are more enlightened or better educated, but because their borders are finally in synch with their various nationalities. Europeans are peaceful because they’re living with the same Europeans. (I’ll mention immigrants in a bit.)

What we can generally say is that World War 2 straightened things out — to the point where you don’t find cities that are split nearly equally among ethnic lines, like many Slovenian cities were for a very long time. We can also see that as soon as borders get fuzzy, like in Bosnia in the 1990s, killing immediately resumes. Keep in mind that Yugoslavs were very well-educated and were force-fed lessons in tolerance and brotherhood for decades. So why did they do it? Because Croats and Serbs and Bosniaks and Slovenes and Czechs and Slovaks all hate the idea of living together. And they’re not alone. Even the English and Scots want to separate, according to one recent poll.

The economist Thomas C. Schelling, as well as Joshua Epstein and others have done some interesting work on artificial societies — using computer simulations to predict group behavior. Some of their results were written about by Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic in a heart-shattering story called Seeing Around Corners. (Paywall, unfortunately) Among other things, Schelling’s early experiments showed that two groups of people (let’s say blue and red) naturally segregated apart, even if neither group necessarily minded being in the minority. The only thing the artificial agents were programmed to mind was being entirely alone. The experiment showed that segregation happens even then. Societies, Rauch concluded, can unconsciously order themselves.

And, unfortunately, they can also do the opposite. Epstein constructed models with two groups, but added ethnic tension and various other elements as well. (Fear of police reprisal, level of anger, etc..) He found that slight shifts in tension often started something of a chain reaction, with the groups eventually going at each other and ultimately wiping each other out — without organizing or working together, just with each agent acting alone.

It’s all very disturbing, but a similar phenomenon seems to keep people segregated in the real world as well. Western Europe, for all its self-congratulatory commitment to “diversity,” is anything but diverse. In fact, I would venture to say that Slovenia, despite having far less foreigners, is in a way more diverse. The reason: chaotic Socialist zoning laws. Whereas western Europe has firmly crystallized into various homogeneous neighborhoods with isolated banlieues, here you can still find lower/middle/upper class residencies mixed up together. This is changing, rapidly, but for the time being that’s how it is.

The United States also has a myth of a melting pot, but it’s more segregated now than it was when there was official segregation. That’s something to think about. (Harper’s ran a depressing story about this that you can read here: Still Separate, Still Unequal.)

In light of this, I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that Slovenia will avoid segregating as well. The Ambrus incident seems to be a natural stage in Slovenia’s development towards a more western European model. Eventually, Slovenia’s Roma will be pushed into even further isolation or — like Epsten’s artificial genocide experiments — something worse will happen. As Rauch writes:

“Epstein has run (his) simulation countless times from different random starting points, and it turns out that neither color enjoys an inherent advantage: blues and greens are equally likely to prevail, with the outcome depending on random local events that tilt the balance one way or the other. No two runs are quite alike. But all are the same in one respect: once a side has attained the upper hand, its greater numbers allow it to annihilate the other side sooner or later.”

Thanks to everyone who sent me links and stories. If you’re interested, here are some:

* Ostracized Roam still struggle across Balkans (Reuters)
* Violence and persecution follow the Roma across Europe (Graudian)
* Blogger Borut Peterlin has been following and reporting on the story intensively

1. One night I saw, from my balcony, a young woman with a group of about four or five young men. The girl was out cold and the men were moving her around and talking about what to do, and specifically what to do to her. It clearly wasn’t going to end well: hence the call to the police. The police insisted that the girl herself had to call and report the fact that she may have been about to get molested while unconscious. The fact that she was K.O. didn’t seem to strike them as precluding that possibility. [back]