Velvet margins

In Kapitál, Diana Burgerová looks at how the Velvet Revolution has impacted marginalized communities in Slovakia.

In the first of three articles, she speaks to members of the queer community. Hana Fabry grew up at a time ‘when gay people were only ever mentioned publicly as the butt of crude jokes’. She was among the first to join the student protests in November 1989 and went on to become a journalist, photographer, queer activist and mentor. In 1992 Fabry joined Slovakia’s first gay rights group Ganymedes, and in 1994 founded Museion, the country’s first lesbian association.

Another gay rights activist, Jaro Gurík, promoted ways of mobilizing people by organizing balls, discos and communal swimming. However, their hopes that the era of criminalization and stigmatization of queer people was over proved short-lived. In recent years, homophobia has been on the rise, reaching its lowest point two years ago when two people were shot dead in a gay bar in Bratislava.

Under socialism, Fabry feared she would be sent for treatment for loving a woman. ‘Lately, I have to fear that just because of the most beautiful thing there is – love – I might be shot dead in the street like Matúš and Juraj. I feel worse now than ever before. In the old days, they didn’t want me to exist, now they hate me. But why?’ asks Fabry.

She believes homophobia is an evil that ‘is inculcated and encouraged by the establishment. We don’t know how to live in democracy, how to live in freedom.’ Meanwhile, Jaro Gurík, having recently returned to Slovakia after twelve years in the UK, tends to an orchard and plans to make use of his British experience to develop support programs for aging queer people.

Upward mobility

In the second article, Burgerová shines the light on the Vietnamese people sent to Czechoslovakia by their government in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s as students or workers. Viet Nguyen was 17 when he arrived in 1982 to study at an engineering college, later working as an interpreter. New arrivals from war-torn Vietnam enjoyed a warm reception, Viet recalls, as people would invite them to their homes for Christmas. Living in the provinces, he didn’t get involved in the events of November 1989, unlike his compatriot Nguyễn Thanh Cương who arrived in 1987 to study at university in Bratislava aged 19. Cương, who still goes by the name Samo his Slovak friends have given him, was swept up in wave of euphoria of the Velvet Revolution, joining protests and rattling keys.

Paradoxically, their lives became more difficult in the 1990s, as attitudes in society changed. ‘On the one hand, it was wonderful – democracy and freedom were suddenly within reach. But it was also a fearful time,’ Samo says. ‘Some people got the wrong idea of what freedom meant, regarding it as a licence for racial discrimination.’ Things got so bad at one stage that they dared to go out only in groups, always carrying wooden sticks and home-made nunchucks, and practiced self-defence in the dormitories. In a notorious case in 1994, six Vietnamese – three men, two women and a child – were murdered in Bratislava.

Many Vietnamese returned to their home country, some migrated to western Europe, while those who stayed had to adapt and find new jobs as the factories that had recruited them went bankrupt. Some turned to selling clothes or electronic goods, others opened restaurants. Many have established firm roots in Slovakia while still supporting their families in Vietnam. ‘Our people are represented in all walks of lives these days, be it industry, services, science or the arts,’ Viet states with pride. In 2025 the Vietnamese were officially recognised as an ethnic minority, not least due to the work of people like Viet, who serves on the Governmental Council for National Minorities.

Structural racism

Among the first to lose their jobs following the revolution were members of the Roma community.  As the country transitioned to the market economy, thousands ended up at the bottom of the heap, their misery exacerbated by being concentrated in settlements in the most impoverished parts of the country. Burgerová talks to Denisa Havrľová, who did not experience overt discrimination as a child. She became a journalist, exposing the practice of Roma children being misdiagnosed as mentally disabled and sent to segregated schools.

She believes that a system has been created where ‘poverty is mistaken for incompetence, ethnicity for diagnosis and social background for a person’s value.’  Disappointed with the current Ombudsman for Roma rights as well as the Roma politicians and activists who emerged after the Velvet Revolution, Havrľová muses: ‘I keep waiting for a Roma Gandhi to stir things up again, someone the Roma would listen to and respect.’

Klára Orgovánová, a clinical psychologist by training and the first person to hold the post of Ombudsperson after its creation in 1999, was someone who commanded such respect.  ‘The Roma are a highly differentiated group,’ Orgovánová explains. ‘You may come across a highly educated person or a brilliant artist, as well as someone on the margins of society or living in a ghetto. But in the new social and economic conditions we embraced following the revolution, Roma from less educated poor families lost out while those from middle class backgrounds got a chance to thrive. Our society owes an enormous debt to the Roma.’

Review by Julia Sherwood