Living beyond the Pale: Environmental Justice and the Roma Minority

Chapter Four: Rudňany: A Tale of the Old Liabilities

CHAPTER FOUR Rudňany: A Tale of the Old Liabilities Rudňany is a small village facing big problems. It is situated in the eastern part of the Slovak Republic, approximately 14 kilometers from the town of Spišská Nová Ves. Its main attraction is an old abandoned tower with a mining lift in the very center of the valley surrounded by the nice twostory houses of the local inhabitants. Rudňany is situated in a valley surrounded by forests. Most of them partly damaged by industrial production in the past. If you enter the village by the main road from the nearest town of Spišská Nová Ves, the first thing you see is the Roma community living on the abandoned and derelict factory site at Zabíjanec. In the summertime , Roma children are jumping into the stream, which is collecting water from closed mines and gathering all possible garbage and waste on its way through the village. You leave Zabíjanec behind and enter the village of the two-story houses and apartment buildings. If you continue, you will come to the hill above the village, where you find a monumental building of the former mining company administration at Pätoracké. The first impression is that the building resembles ruins of towns impacted by heavy bombing and fires during World War II. If you get closer, you find small huts and houses made of scrap material on the slopes around it. You are still in Rudňany, but you have crossed two different worlds through an ethnic line, which is not marked on the ground but of which all the inhabitants are well aware. Here I attempt to illustrate differentiated access to environmental benefits and harm through the case of Rudňany—a story of Roma people and their environment. The Middle Spiš region where the village is located is reportedly one of the most beautiful parts of the Slovak Republic. High mountains, deep forests, and ancient towns with traces of medieval ages prosperity brought about mining and trade attract tourism and provide assets for the inhabi- 70 Living Beyond the Pale tants. At the same time people in the region struggle with high unemployment , the collapse of traditional industries, and face pressures from social and economic development shaped by global and national context. The region has a multiethnic character, where you find (besides Slovaks) a strong Hungarian minority in the south and a relatively large minority of Roma spread all around the region. Because of its multiethnic character and social stratification, this place is of extreme importance for understanding the relationships among ethnic origin, social status, and the environment . Figure 9. Location of the Rudňany village Administratively this place belongs to the district of Spišska Nová Ves (see Figure 9). The village faces problems of a collapsed economy due to the closing of the mines and ore-processing factory at the beginning of the 1990s, and due to the past industrial activities is endangered by industrial pollution as one of the environmental hot spots in Slovakia. These rather negative factors provide three criteria important for environmental justice research: (i) Ethnic composition and clear ethnic/class division—a strong Roma minority; (ii) Social situation—negative economic impacts of the economic transformation on the inhabitants; and (iii) Environment—large-scale environmental degradation due to past industrial activities. I cannot recollect when I first heard about the Roma in Rudňany. I guess it was in the mid-1990s, when the extreme situation of the local Roma attracted journalists covering the country. Environmental conditions Rudňany: A Tale of the Old Liabilities 71 were sporadically mentioned in these articles as an aspect of Roma life. When I started to explore the nexus of poverty, discrimination, and the environment, the village came to mind as the natural place to start. The goal was simple. I was interested to see if we could frame the social, economic , and environmental problems in Rudňany as a case of environmental injustice. And if so, what are the social processes that have contributed to the present situation? There is perhaps no better point of departure than to start with examining the historical, social, political, and environmental context that has influenced the present location of the two Roma settlements in the village. What especially matter is the power division and the relations that shape the lives of the majority and minority in...