Mayor of Chomutov takes fresh action against town’s debtors

The town of Chomutov in north Bohemia is up in arms. Its controversial mayor Ivana Řápková has declared war on the town’s 4,000 or so debtors, most of them members of the Romany minority. After a court banned the town hall from seizing their social benefits to make up for unpaid rents, the mayor took a new tack – ordering a wide-scale confiscation of debtors’ property for unpaid fines.

Ivana Řápková of the Civic Democratic Party is possibly the toughest mayor the town of Chomutov has ever seen. She is determined to enforce law and order and make those whom she calls “problematic citizens” toe the line. This concerns particularly the town’s Romany minority – low-income families most of whom have no jobs, no education and depend entirely on social benefits. They owe the city thousands of crowns in unpaid rent and unpaid fines for public order offenses. Although the town hall has no right to forcibly reclaim larger sums of money, it can demand money for unpaid fines. And the mayor sees this as a way of making Romanies “behave”.

“The confiscations of property will continue – not every day maybe, but certainly every week. These people will be made to see that they must meet their obligations or else they have to live by the rules – stop pestering decent people and committing small-scale crime. Then we will have no reason to fine them and they will not owe us money.”

Ivana Řápková

Those who owe the town hall money in unpaid fines are finding it almost impossible to hide – the mayor has employed a number of heavies to seek out the debtors in pubs, casinos, on the street and in their own homes. Romany prostitutes are being brought in off the streets and families owing 800 crowns (just under 45 US dollars) are seeing their TV sets and computers taken away. Never before have debtors been subjected to such a merciless demand for them to meet their obligations and the crackdown has brought angry protests from Roma rights activists and the Ombudsman’s office. Ombudsman Otakar Motejl says the move is clearly intended to win the mayor votes in the upcoming general elections.

“If they had taken an effort to address the problem of unpaid fines in time they would never have reached such astronomical figures and would have imposed order as well. If I fine someone 500 crowns for kicking over a garbage can – it would make sense to try and claim that fine within the next fortnight”

Ivana Řápková denies that her policy is an election ploy, saying that she is merely doing her job in protecting the towns’ decent and law-abiding inhabitants from those who break the rules. Her policy has divided local residents – some are shocked, others are applauding. Meanwhile political commentators note that Ivana Řápková would not be the first to rise on the political ladder by taking a tough line with the Roma minority. The former mayor of Vsetín Jiří Čunek was catapulted into the world of high politics overnight by forcibly moving Romany rent defaulters outside the city-centre.