Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)
Interaction, migration and change
200 Renata Weinerová bitant figures, and the debtors do not manage to pay interest on interest. The most insolvent Roma become the victims of the so-called ethno-business. The practice is usually such that the Roma are involuntarily moved by usurers to an airport in Prague or Budapest and are provided with flight tickets to any west-European country where Roma get higher social benefits than in Slovakia and thus can pay more to the usurers. Since the asylum law does not permit applicants to leave the country in which the asylum is applied for, Slovak Roma, on their way back to their home country, were regularly (intentionally) losing their passport since they needed to avoid having their passport marked with a Slovak stamp. That is why they usually applied for new passports in Slovakia to travel back to the target country with an unused document - to continue receiving social benefits or to stay in touch with relatives living in the asylum centers abroad. The travels between their original place of residence and the target country was usually made in a taxi which, together with the fact that they were receiving social benefits also in the place of their residence, was not perceived well both by the local authorities and by the local population. The media descriptions of the usury practices of Roma in Slovakia present Slovak Roma as immoral citizens who are at the border or beyond the border of legality. Slovak journalists, however, do not comment on the real roots of the problem. A Czech anthropologist, Stanislav Kužel (2000: 151-153) thoroughly analyzes the problem of usury in Slovakia. He points out above all the “hidden economy of Roma segregation as a communist heritage” from which, after the year 1989, the “hidden economy of segregation as an economy of disinterest” has evolved. Kužel in his study analyzes on a detailed basis the mechanism of where the Roma poverty stems from, the poverty which is, together with a decrease in social income, always accompanied by falling into debts in pawnshops and further leads to an increase in intra-ethnic clientship system (usury). For many Roma families in tenement houses it is a disaster already when arrears in rent of over 5,000 crowns arise. Due to their functional illiteracy,
