Prague, Aug 21 (CTK) – The Czech government approved the purchase of the pig farm located at the site of a former Nazi internment camp for the Roma in Lety, south Bohemia, at its meeting on Monday, Minister for Human Rights Jan Chvojka tweeted.
Chvojka said the farm is to stop its operation next spring, after the company meets its deals on pork meat deliveries.
The state wants to sign the sale contract with the pig farm’s owner, the AGPI firm, as soon as possible, probably next month, Culture Minister Daniel Herman said.
The price will be released after the signing, he said. AGPI shareholders have confirmed that the set price offered by the government is acceptable for them, he added.
Herman said a dignified memorial may be built on the site in the next few years.
He said on Twitter that all government’s ministers supported the purchase of the farm on Monday.
Herman and Chvojka led the negotiations with the AGPI company on behalf of the state. The AGPI approved the planned purchase three weeks ago.
AGPI board deputy chairman Jan Cech told CTK that he would not comment on the price because he still did not know how much the government would pay for the pig farm.
“It is good that it was possible to complete a very sensitive issue after 20 years. We are glad that all discussions and various disputes, arguments and demonstrations related to the issue will end and that the government can build an adequate memorial to the victims,” Cech said.
People from the Roma community have been waiting for the purchase and planned removal of the pig farm for a long time and they feel relieved, Museum of Romani Culture head Jana Horvathova told CTK.
“We consider the purchase as the righting of old wrongs,” she said.
The Museum of Romani Culture, seated in Brno and supervised by the Culture Ministry, is the body that may administer the site of the former camp.
Karel Holomek, head of the Roma Community in Moravia, said the place in Lety should have a commemorative character.
The AGPI originally preferred an exchange of the Lety farm for a pig farm situated elsewhere, but later it accepted a financial compensation.
According to estimates, the farm may cost several hundreds of millions of crowns. In 1998, former minister Vladimir Mlynar said the owners demanded 300 million crowns, which was two times more than the farm’s market price that the owners presented.
President Milos Zeman, who had been prime minister in 1998-2002, recently said he had refused to remove the farm because it would have cost the state about 400 million crowns.
Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka said previously that his outgoing government would like to lead the negotiations to a successful end. The general election is due in late October.
Several Czech governments have dealt with the issue since 1998.
The European Parliament as well as other international organisations have called on the Czech Republic repeatedly to remove the farm from the commemorative site.
The construction of the Lety pig farm started under the communist regime in 1972. The current complex on a 7.1-hectare includes 13 halls with 13,000 pigs in total. The AGPI installed new technologies in a half of the halls in 2013-2015. The firm would transfer the complex to the state without farm animals and employees.
In 2016, AGPI’s turnover was 388 million crowns, including 172 million crowns for pork meat production.
The labour camp in Lety was opened in 1940. A similar facility existed in Hodonin u Kunstatu, south Moravia. In 1942, both facilities turned into internment camps and in August of the same year, Roma camps were established there.
Until May 1943, 1308 Roma men, women and children were interned there, 327 of whom perished in the camp and over 500 were sent to the extermination camp in Auschwitz where most of them died. According to estimates, the Nazis exterminated 90 percent of Czech Roma people.
In Hodonin u Kunstatu, a permanent exhibition on the Czech Roma Holocaust is to open.
