To protest Czech President Milos Zeman’s suggestion that Roma do not work, the country’s Roma minority flooded social media with photos showing the opposite.
“It’s no longer amusing to hear people say we don’t work. So we’ll flood Facebook with our work photos,” Stefan Pongo, the mastermind of the campaign, had posted on his Facebook page on October 2.
He received more than 1,000 photos from Roma holding down various jobs in the Czech Republic but also in Britain, Germany and Ireland.
As reported by the Agence France-Presse (AFP), Pongo’s social media initiative was backed by Romea, a Czech Roma rights NGO, which on Wednesday published a collage of some of the photos on www.romea.cz, its website.
Meanwhile, Zeman was criticised by the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), which on October 1 sent him an open letter condemning his “racist scorn for Romani citizens of the Czech Republic”.
Between 250,000 and 300,000 Roma live in this EU member state of 10.6 million people.
