After clashes between the police and a few inhabitants of the Rahova neighborhood in Bucharest, law enforcement agents are facing accusations of having abused several people in the area, including a mother and one of her children.
On Easter Sunday, around 9pm, Ioana Mihai, a 29-year-old woman, was watching the movie Titanic on ProTv. She was in bed with three of her four children, whom she’s raising alone in a house in Rahova. Before the pandemic, the woman would make daily rounds with her children, after they returned from school, to collect scrap metal in their horse-drawn carriage. That was one of their few sources of income.
At a certain point during the movie, Ioana heard a noise coming from the yard and got up to see what had happened. She says she didn’t even make it to the window, when several masked police officers barged in on her. They grabbed her by the arms and hair and pushed her outside. They threatened her with a beating if she spoke so much as a single word and took her out to the gate, by the police car, where several other female neighbors were standing, both Roma and non-Roma. “They lined us all up on the ground. Next to each other, on our knees, women only, children in tow and all,” Ioana recounts.
Ioana’s home is right next door to the yard where, during a Facebook live video on Sunday evening, Vasile Badea, also known as Spartacus, said: “I’ll be damned if I don’t topple the police the second they get here. We’re waiting for the police. Revolution! Revolution!” Spartacus’ wish came true. After a 112 call around 8:45pm, which informed of a scandal, several police cars and constables arrived at the party where Spartacus had gone live. They were greeted with pieces of concrete bricks and rocks. Several policemen were injured. The officers immobilized some of the attackers, used tear gas and shot several rounds of fire.
Over the past week, other clashes occurred between the authorities and members of Roma communities in other Romanian towns, from Ploiești to Săcele and Codlea. Yesterday, news broke of police abuse against a group of Roma in Bolintin-Vale, Giurgiu County, who were barbecuing outside their yard. Under the pretense that they had broken quarantine rules, a police officer savagely beat up one of them, who broke out in screams of pain. Subsequently, the head of local police was fired and a criminal case was opened against him for abusive behavior.
While many social network users approve of police violence, fueling the already inflamed racism from the beginning of the pandemic, two NGOs are asking for resignations and putting an end to aggressions against the Roma.
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On Easter, Ioana had also been to her neighbors’ yard, where Spartacus’ nephew and his family live. They’d invited her over for a barbecue, but she says she was only there for a few minutes. “I went there with my kids, got a bit of mutton and handed it to the boy, I didn’t spend any time there.” She believes the police barged in on her to look for some of the men who attacked law enforcement agents.
After she was made to kneel by the gate next to her neighbors, Ioana asked a uniformed man to let her find her children. “‘Shut the f*ck up, you f*cking n*gger,’” the man allegedly responded.
Two of her children, Maria (11) and Vasile (9) had managed to run off to their grandmother. The police found the youngest one hiding. “I was hiding over there, in our shed, out back, behind those tin sheets, in the yard,” says Nicolas, a six-year-old boy, his eyes glued to the ground. He says a police officer tugged at his arm, twisted it around his back and flicked him across the forehead. Then, he also made him kneel next to his mother, by the gate.
“I believe this abuse happens because there is no political force, there’s no one defending the Roma when such abuse happens. It’s very easy to walk into Roma homes. It’s not clear whether they had a search warrant. For instance, in [alleged teenager murder] Dincă’s case, the police waited 13 hours for a search warrant. Here, they didn’t waste a single second, they brought the Special Ops and just walked inside the houses,” says Norbert Iuonas, a Roma activist and coordinator of the Romanian branch of the JustRom program.
Ioana, along with her six-year-old son, and other women with their underaged children, was shoved into a constabulary van and taken to Police Precinct 19, by the Rahova Market.
According to Bucharest police officials, 37 people were taken in for hearings that evening. Bucharest Police spokesperson Diana Sarca has confirmed that children were also taken in, but was unable to explain why. “I don’t hold this information, but I know that several women came in with their children, to accompany their partners.” She advised us to ask for details from the Sector 5 Tribunal, but at press time, they had yet to respond to our inquiries.
When they got to the precinct, Ioana says they made them all stand in the yard, “face against the wall, outside, one meter away from each other.” All of them, including her six-year-old son. They spent no less than four hours like this, during which time she says they were shaking with cold. When someone needed to use the bathroom, the officer would make them relieve themselves slightly further away from the rest. They wouldn’t take them to the indoor bathroom. And when someone was thirsty, they were made to drink water from a hose.
Ioana recounts that when Spartacus’ wife, who was also being held up against the wall in the precinct yard, dared ask why they were being held like this, instead of an answer she got “punched in the ribs”. “Three guys were hitting her on each side till she dropped to the floor and her whole face was covered in blood.”
After four hours, the police officers took them all inside, in a room with fitness machines. When they wanted to sit down, the people were cussed out and ordered to sit on the floor, says Ioana. They were cold and the woman regretted not putting on more layers of clothing as she’d gotten into bed to watch the movie. “If I’d been wearing two skirts, I could’ve taken one off and covered the boy with it.” But she only had one, so she took off her sweater and covered the little one, while she was only left wearing a t-shirt.
The six-year-old child is not yet in school, but he’s already learned two lessons that are even hard to stomach for an adult: terror and humiliation.
The following day at noon, after roughly 15 hours of waiting, Ioana was finally questioned. She says she was asked if she had witnessed the fight, who were the people featured in Spartacus’ live video, and what her relation with him is. “I told them we sometimes visited each other, since we’re neighbors, there’s no way we’d resent each other or have bad blood between us.”
Ioana says that Spartacus lives in Germany with his family and that he had come home three weeks prior because of the pandemic. She also says she doesn’t know the occupation of this man with significant influence in the neighborhood.
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Since Monday afternoon when they returned from the precinct, police cars, constabularies, and TV crews have been constantly stationed outside the gates of Ioana's and her neighbors’ houses, while helicopters overflew the area. “They’ve terrified the children, the children start shaking when they see them,” Ioana says.
When she has to go get food, Ioana brings along the statement written in cursive on a lined sheet she’s torn out of one of her children’s notebooks. Below her name and address, it says, “At my own risk, I declare I am going to the store.” Even though she was only in school for four years, Ioana can read and write.
Crina Mureșanu, a sector 5 social worker, who’s known Ioana well for over a year, says the woman is a “resource person” within the community–she helps the women around her whenever they need to solve a problem.
“Ioana is one of the most honest people I’ve met, she’s respectful, determined, she’s hands-on, I’ve been really impressed with the way she’s overcoming her situation,” Crina Mureșanu says.
Ioana won’t keep quiet in the face of injustice
Ioana would like the officers who took her and her six-year-old child to the precinct on Sunday night to be held accountable. “I’d like to file a complaint against them. Both me and my child were punished for no reason. My children are traumatized.” Poignantly, the street where they live crosses paths with the Antifascist Combatants’ Road.
The JustRom legal counsels, who support Roma women who want to go to court, have explained the legal procedures in such situations to Ioana. Should she decide to file a complaint, they will put her in contact with lawyers who can handle her case pro bono. Ioana wants justice for herself but, at the same time, she’s worried that if she pursues it, the police officers will take revenge on her and her children.
“Someone born in a community that’s been structurally marginalized by the state knows the authorities are not on their side; what’s more, every time they’ve had to deal with the authorities, they lost,” sociologist Dani Sandu explains.
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Following the Sunday night conflict in the Rahova neighborhood, five men, including Spartacus, have been taken into custody and two women have been placed under judicial control, according to Bucharest Police statements. Spartacus returned to Facebook with a message to says he was sorry about what he had done.
Diana Sarca, Bucharest Police spokesperson, says no complaints have been filed in relation to the officers’ Sunday night intervention. Prosecutor Costel Puntaru, spokesperson for the Sector 5 Tribunal Prosecutor’s Office, has told us: “Their intervention is not being investigated at the moment. There is no reason for us to investigate, at least up until this moment, as we haven’t received any such requests.”
Sources in the field say that some of the people who were abusively taken to the precinct have been to the National Legal Medicine Institute, in order to obtain proof they were beaten up by the police officers on Sunday night. But they’re afraid to proceed, after other neighbors were threatened with further beatings by the officers, should they file complaints, and were told to state that they fought among themselves.
Translated from the Romanian by Ioana Pelehatăi. Read the original here.
