Lety, South Bohemia, June 24 (CTK) – The EU must stop subsidising the AGPI firm that owns a pig farm on the site of a World War Two Roma concentration camp in Lety, Benjamin Abtan, anti-racist European Grassroots Antiracist Movement (EGAM) president, told CTK at an activists’ meeting today.
A member of the management of AGPI company, which owns the pig far, told CTK that it receives no subsidies from the EU for the farm’s operation. Negotiations on the buy-out of the farm will continue in July, AGPI said.
The meeting in Lety, to which some 300 people from 15 countries arrived, was also attended by Czech Justice Minister Robert Pelikan.
Abtan said Lety is an international symbol of disrespect for Holocaust victims and a shame of the Czech Republic.
He said the situation has an easy solution: the EU must stop the subsidies it pays to the pig farm and the farm owners must make an accommodating gesture because the decency of the Holocaust victims is more than its profit.
Responsibility rests with the Czech Republic because Roma people with Czech citizenship were imprisoned and tortured in Lety and the guards and murderers were Czech police, Abtan said.
The removal of the pig farm would cost several million euros, which is nothing for the Czech state budget, Abtan said.
He said unless agreement with the farm owners is possible, the Czech state will have to expropriate the farm.
EGAM associates 53 human rights organisations.
Jan Cech, deputy head of the AGPI board, told CTK that the firm receives no European subsidies for the farm’s operation. “This year, last year, the year before, none whatsoever. These are the activists’ platitudes,” Cech said.
The Czech government of Bohuslav Sobotka (Social Democrats, CSSD) says it wants to complete the talks with the farm owners. The culture ministry has had an expert opinion on the value of the land, real estate and technological equipment of the farm worked out. The farm also has its own proposal.
Activists fear that the matter will not be completed by the October general election.
Pelikan told CTK that the government has assigned the culture and human rights ministries to prepare the buy-out of the pig farm, but this has not yet been fulfilled.
Cech said AGPI has been in permanent contact with the culture ministry. “Various expert opinions, proposals have been made, questions raised, but no one has ever proposed a price. Everything is being prepared, a team has been formed at the culture ministry,” Cech said, adding that no specific proposal has been made, however.
“I believe that a commemorative place and nothing else, the less so a pig farm, should be on such site. This is terrible. When I was inside to see it, a cattle waggon with a new supply of pigs for liquidation arrived. The parallel was awful,” Pelikan said.
The Lety camp was opened as a labour and disciplinary one by the Nazi-controlled authorities in August 1940. From 1942 until May 1943, 1308 Roma men, women and children passed through the camp. Out of them, 327 died there and more than 500 died in Oswiecim (Auschwitz). Fewer than 600 Roma prisoners returned from concentration camps after the war. The Nazis murdered an estimated 90 percent of Czech Roma people.
A place of remembrance was opened in Lety in 2010.
