The local government of Veszprém, headed by former Free Democrat mayor László Dióssy, paid three million Forints to each Roma family if they left the city limits. The concerned received the cheque for this amount when all their kith and kin were already in the moving van, the windows of the abandoned flat were all boarded up, and the owner of their future house had already been introduced to them. According to the study by Judit Tímár and Erika Nagy, this was how things happened from the end of the 1990's for about ten years. The city of queens (Veszprém) paid 163 million Forints - under the title of Urban regeneration - in order to get rid of its problematic poor population and "export" it to three neighbouring settlements. (When Marian Cozma, the handball player of the Veszprém team was murdered, rumour had it in town that the murderers might be Romas who had been relocated to Berhida - this assumption later proved to be incorrect.) In Ferencváros (the IXth district of Budapest), also led by liberals, a different approach was taken: the local government bought flats from private individuals for those they planned to relocate, in almost 50 percent of the cases, these flats were in areas belonging to other local governments.

The renewal of inner cities is necessary. During Socialism, the large flats situated in the historical centers of the towns, and which were considered to be "bourgeois", were divided up into smaller ones, and quite often, the new inhabitants were poor families. For decades, no money was spent on restoring the inner cities, ˇand new urban centers were built instead. By the time the political system changed, most historical inner cities had become dilapidated. Gypsy settlements have developed in the capital's inner areas, for example in Százház Street behind Keleti train station, in the Magdolna quarter or in the area behind Corvin cinema, in other areas, intact slums have developed (the so-called "Dzsumbuj" in Ferencváros, Francia Street in the XIVth district, or the MÁV-houses in Podmaniczky Street).

Romas who have been bought out

Within residential areas, there are "warrens" composed of dark, cold-water flats with no modern conveniences, called gypsy-houses by the locals. Sociologists feared that these areas would become ethnic ghettoes, but that was not how things turned out; as a result of population exchange, the size of the pauperized groups, among them the Romas, decreased. The Romas were bought out of their flats - which were primarily owned by the local governments - in the course of property development, urban regeneration or - mainly in the countryside - the elimination of Gypsy colonies.

Superfluous masses

Town-dwellers tend to think that with middle-class people moving into the new houses, social inequalities have become non-existent. In reality, "the ghetto has moved from 50 meters to 200 kilometers". In the meantime, the (forcefully) relocated have had to face the fact - pointed out by sociologist János Ladányi - that they have become superfluous for the developing modern city. This superfluity is symbolized by the fact that when the "bought out" inhabitants of these blocks leave, the doors and windows of the flats they used to live in are boarded up to prevent anyone else from moving in until the arrival of the bulldozer. The money they receive is only enough to buy a flat in the peripheral areas - that is how the poor of the inner cities arrive to the one-time industrialized regions, inhabited by the unemployed, or to almost deserted villages, or to Csepel, where up to 17 people might live in a 52-square-meter flat. Their superfluity can also be sensed by the protests voiced by locals upon their arrival. This process makes these already problematic families even more aggressive, and quite often even the local Roma population protests against the newcomers moving in.

Families exchanged for arable land

In Füzér, in the Zemplén mountains, the situation was untenable: 16-18 Roma families were living right below the castle, on territory that was quite valuable touristically. They did not have them moved into the village, instead, the local government exchanged the plot, along with the Gypsies living on it, with an entrepreneur for a large plot of arable land. The investor provided the Roma with exchange flats, a bit further away. Even though they were given flats in Sátoraljaújhely, for example, they only stayed there for a day, moving on the following day.

"They didn't feel good there," says the mayor, Péter Szamosvölgyi, explaining why the town bought them houses in a neighbouring village. To our question of why these large Roma families with lots of children couldn not stay in Sátoraljaújhely, the mayor retorted: "And in Füzér?" The Roma Civil Rights' Foundation would have liked to buy flats in Füzér for the remaining eight Roma families, but to no avail, for the local government outbid them in the case of every single house and plot, so they couldn't buy them. Strange as it may seem, the "relocation" programme was actually completed by the Roma civil rights activists, they moved the families in the end.

Pool for horses, eco-village

Usually, the relocation of the poor is wrapped in the most beautiful programmes, ethnic cleansing is never mentioned. The town of Gyöngyös, for example, dreamt of building a pool for horses and an eco-village similar to the ones in Austria, in place of its slums. However, the half billion Forints it won in a tender was only enough to buy out those living there for about three-four million Forints. Zsolt Lakatos, chairman of the Together for Gyöngyös Roma-Hungarian Association thinks double this amount would have been needed to buy flats in the town. So instead of a pool for horses, there was nothing but for the concerned to move to the neighbouring villages, except for those who managed to secure a rented flat for themselves in Gyöngyös.

Those who had been excluded from the capital turned up in the Jászság area, for example on the one-time weekend plots of the Neszűr district of Jászberény, which is now gradually turning into a slum. In other words, all that is happening is that the ghetto has moved to another place, for in some of the huts which are barely 6-8 square meters, there are now 20-30 people. The local Roma population, which was originally around 400-500, and of whom at least 50 percent had a decent job, has doubled in the past few years. "Ironically, they even used European Union funds to relocate these people," says Dániel Juhász, Fidesz deputy-mayor of the "refridgerator town" (The refridgerator factory in the town used to produce Lehel fridges for decades, now Electrolux provides 6-7000 people with jobs in the region).

Seven Roma families have moved from Gyöngyös. In the past few years, the arrival of people relocated from the cities has led to growing ethnic tension, resulting in the Hungarian Guard's demonstrations and marches, and the lynching of a teacher in Olaszliszka. According to Romologist Antal Zoltán Apró, "breaking up the Roma communities was a terrible step", as support from their families, friends and neighbours is a lot more important for the poor than for those who are better off.

Eradicating slum districts without conducting social crisis management may harm the social fabric elsewhere. An example of this is Egercsehi, where they won money from the ministry of social affairs for the elimination of the Csókos colony. They bought local government flats from the money - not on their own territory, but in Vaja, for example. According to Sándor Tisza, the mayor of Vaja, only one family arrived at first, then another four or five, who bought flats from private individuals. As a consequence, the fate of the whole area of the settlement was sealed: there are regular incidents involving the police, the "original inhabitants" are selling their houses, and the area has been classified as fit "to be eradicated".

Fugitive "original inhabitants"

The social problems of Vaja, a town with four thousand inhabitants, have increased significantly. Each year, the elimination of the colony in Egercsehi will cost the town two million Forints, for they will have to pay welfare benefits to the large families who have moved in, with eight-ten children each.

The poor, unemployed parents have very different life strategies from the "original inhabitants". They live on welfare, and the easiest way they can increase their social income is by having more and more children. The long-term effects of relocation can be seen through the example of the rich town of Paks and the poor village of Fadd. Paks, home of the nuclear power plant, relocated Romas to the neighbouring villages in two waves. In 1983, after the nuclear power plant was built, they got rid of 400 Romas. 120 of them arrived to Fadd, where 12 houses were bought for them. A few years ago, when a farmstead on the outskirts of Paks became unsafe to live in, they bought another three houses in our village, recalls János Fülöp, mayor of Fadd. As a result of the rich town's "social export", the proportion of Roma in the village grew from 2 percent in the 1980's to 17 percent. "In the school, their proportion is 35 percent, in nursery school, it's already 50 percent," Fülöp explains how a programme to "eradicate a colony" somewhere else can change the life of an ageing village.

Of course, the sender town never calls the process the expulsion of Romas. Instead, it argues that there isn't enough available property in the more prosperous settlements. This was supposedly the reason why Szeged relocated 6 homeless Roma families to Jánoshalma, and why Siklós would like to move the Romas living in the vicinity of the castle to the neighbouring villages, with the help of EU grants.

At first, the Roma who live in deep poverty do not rebel against the events, for their new housing conditions are usually better than their former ones. It is only later that they realize that the only ones to profit from this solution are the "sending towns". The non-profit association RomAssist, for example, relocated 48 people from the Hangony colony in Borsod county. Three families moved to Ózd, into newly renovated houses that used to be hovels but which now have all the modern commodities. "We've been thrust into even deeper poverty," one of the occupants complains. Since there is no chance of finding a job, the families living on welfare benefits are unable to pay the utility bills, which are high even by lower-middle-class standards. "The eradication of the colony is important from the children's point of view," says Norbert Varga, president of RomAssist, to our paper. He also thinks generations will have to grow up before the positive effects can be felt.

We can more or less see where the poor have disappeared from, but where do they go? Whenever Heti Válasz went on a report, from Olaszliszka to Kesznyéten, we always came across Romas who had been expulsed from Budapest and other cities. According to János Ladányi, we can find them not only in the new ghettoes that have developed on the outskirts of large cities, but also in the villages, where the population had been decreasing up till the change of the political system, but since then, the tendency has changed completely. The professor of Corvinus University has found five hundred villages like this. The number of ethnic ghetto-villages is continually increasing, the question is whether those who were relocated will eventually filter back into the cities (as they are doing in the case of the area around Veszprém), or whether the villages will grow into whole regions, posing an impossibly great challenge to the country.


The example of France

An additional aim of organising the Soccer World Cup in 1998 was the regeneration of the Parisian suburb of Saint Denis. Once the hunting grounds of French kings, Saint Denis had formerly developed into one of Europe's largest industrial plants. It was, however, easy to organise strikes there, so the factories were relocated to other regions of France. Immigrants moved in where factory workers had once lived, and a slum developed around the beautiful Gothic cathedral. For the occasion of the soccer world cup, a stadium and metro lines were built in Saint Denis, as well as parks on top of the motorways. The aim was not to conceal the local population, but to help diminish their disadvantages. They are trying to do something similar in the Hungarian capital, on Ferenc Square and in the Magdolna quarter, and also in Komló, in southern Hungary.


New ghettoes are created

The Roma are moving from the urban ghettoes of large cities to ageing, depopulated villages in crisis areas. The local governments consider this process as positive, although on a national scale, it is an adverse phenomenon. For while the boundaries of urban "danger zones" are easy to define, making it easier to avoid clashes, anyone travelling through ghetto-villages may unexpectedly find themselves in ethnic danger. It is primarily where the Roma community belongs to the "underclass" that the danger of this happening is the greatest.