FRANTISEK KONA lives with 12 relatives in a shabby two-room flat with a concrete floor for a bed and shreds of cloth in the glassless windows. He is one of the lucky ones: his building is made of breeze blocks. Across the dirt track where children play, his neighbours live in wooden and corrugated iron shacks that offer no defence against the cold.

In a shanty settlement on the edge of the village of Moldava in eastern Slovakia Mr Kona, and 400 other Roma who will become EU citizens on May 1, endure an existence grim even by Third World standards. To cook, they gather branches. To drink and wash they use river water polluted by sewage.

Mr Kona has had five children with his current wife, although two died in infancy. His first wife and their three children share the flat.

They depend almost totally on state benefits, which used to amount to £130 a month until the Government introduced welfare reforms to encourage people to work. Now they get £65 a month. “It is not enough for clothes. It is not enough for food. Sometimes we go for two or three days without food,” said Mr Kona, 40, who was educated for just four years. “If I work, I get just 50 Slovakian crowns (83p) a day. I do manual work in the dirtiest places; it’s terrible work.”

Julius Grulyo, the leader of the village’s Roma community, says that their unemployment rate stands at 99 per cent. “The Government is trying to destroy us”, he protests. When the benefit cuts started a month ago, Moldava’s Roma demonstrated in the town centre, but melted away when the army arrived. A similar demonstration, which turned into a riot, was brutally suppressed by police and military in the neighbouring town of Trebisov.

The Roma are thought to have migrated from northern India about 400 years ago, and remain almost totally excluded from mainstream society, despised and ostracised. They are sometimes called Gypsies, or mistaken for Egyptians.

They make up nearly 10 per cent of Slovakia’s 5.4 million population, and are concentrated in the poorer, eastern half of the country, often living in shanty settlements.

During the Second World War they were herded into death camps, along with Jews and homosexuals, and are still attacked periodically by skinheads. Life expectancy is 17 years less than that of other Slovakians. In Kosice, the region’s largest city, the previous Communist Government herded them into a compound of concrete blocks called Lunick IX, deliberately creating a Roma ghetto.

Their high birth rates — six children is normal and ten not uncommon — have alarmed the Government, which was accused last year of initiating a programme of compulsory sterilisation of Roma women, against their wishes.

The Roma are widely reviled as petty criminals, but a recent United Nations Development Programme said that crime was often their only alternative to starvation. In Moldava, Robert Rybar, 18, already the father of two young children and living with 12 people in a two-room flat, said that crime was sometimes the only option. “I don’t want to do bad things, like theft. I don ’t want to go to jail. But if my children are sick, I need the money for the doctor and I have to do these things,” he said.

Even the better-educated Roma encounter discrimination. Albin Horvath, who lives with his wife and three children in a neat flat in Moldava, was educated until he was 18 and was a driver at a local factory for 18 years until he was made redundant last year.

“I’m told there are jobs for me at factories, but I go there and they see I am Roma and they tell me the job doesn’t exist. No one wants to help us because we have dark skin.”

He sees Slovakia’s imminent EU membership as a chance to escape. He plans to head west to find work to support his family, and is already learning the languages. “I don’t want to bring my wife or children, but to go by myself to find work. When I have a job, everything will be good.”

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