The raids included restaurants, pubs and other public hangouts. The strategy of the police was to send someone into the restaurants in advance to check the layout of the space, so that all exits could be blocked. The police had a list of facilities to be targeted, mainly places where foreign mostly American residents gather. Following the daily arrests, during the nights the police were using helicopters with spot lights to locate those whom their spokesman labelled as "unfit people", involving the homeless, the unemployed, and all "such people". Police spokesman Petr Link dismissed the complaints about the behaviour of the police. He said: "Of course we were using helicopters, but not on the foreigners, we used them on unfit persons. We were just trying how it would work out on parking lots where there are a lot of homeless people and others." Link repeatedly referred to the homeless and unemployed when he defended the new policy of policing. He said: "On one side people are calling on us to get rid of unfit people, and then we start doing it and others say that we are inhuman. But those who criticise it are only the homeless, for instance, and such people."

The new policy, and this jargon, should not have come as such a surprise to the foreign community in Prague, in light of the growing exclusionist tendencies within Czech society. Last year the Czech Parliament passed a citizenship law which severely discriminated against the Romany population in the country. The law requires that all those who apply for Czech citizenship (after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia) must have a clean criminal record in the past five years. This was mainly aimed at the local Romanies, many of whom have been convicted of petty offences such as theft and pick-pocketing. The Romany population is severely marginalised in Czech society, with the highest rates of unemployment and poverty, and anti-Romany sentiments among Czechs are extreme. Most polls show that Czechs consider Romanies second-class citizens and trouble-makers who do not deserve the benefits of equal treatment.

Similar sentiments prevail against the homeless and even against the unemployed, who are considered suspicious and deserving of exclusion.

Czech citizenship law has drawn some decided criticism from the Council of Europe, which has threatened to block the Czech entry into the EU in the near future unless the law is reversed. Czech President Vaclav Havel is also against the law and against the practices of discrimination taking off in the Czech Republic, but he has been overridden by the dominant forces of the Czech self-proclaimed "Thatcherist" right-wing government headed by Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus.

The worrying questions are concerned with where the homeless and the unemployed are taken, and what rights they have that can be enforced while they are in police custody. Czech independent governments have an appalling record in the treatment of minorities; the most startling example of discrimination was their expulsion of approximately three million Sudeten Germans from the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia to Germany, with their property confiscated. Even today, the Czech right-wing government is refusing to restitute property to Sudeten Germans, because of the fear of their return to the country and becoming citizens. Together with the Germans, Czechs (this time together with Slovaks) have also expelled thousands of Hungarians since World War Two. The significant thing is that the same sentiments can be discerned today in the Czech populace, and that the present Klaus government is in many crucial ways similar to the post World War Two Government headed by the National Socialist politician Eduard Benes, who issued decrees governing the mass expulsions.

The discrimination in the Czech treatment of national minorities is in certain ways more dangerous than that in the Balkans or in other parts of the world where there are open military conflicts and where parties are accused of "ethnic cleansing". It is more dangerous because it is quiet and hidden, but systematic, and represents a continuous deprivation of marginalised people of their human dignity and civil rights.

The Czech Republic has received considerable benefits from the West in terms of investment and public and political support for its "breakaway" from Communism. However, if Western governments are to retain the standards of respect for human rights with which they have been conducting their domestic and foreign policy for decades, then they must recognise the need to force post-Communist regimes to show respect for national minorities, even if breaches of human and civil rights are not marked by civil conflicts such as in the Balkans.

The Czechs must be reproached more decisively and, if necessary, sanctioned by the international community, if they continue to refuse to change their treatment of Romanies, and if they do not reverse the blatant exclusion and stigmatisation of the poor and the unemployed. These practices, to a certain extent characteristic of the so-called "high Manchester capitalism", have long been abandoned in the West and are generally considered intolerable in the democratic world. A closer look into the current and the emerging policies and laws of the Czech conservative government reveals that these democratic standards may be in the process of being questioned by the rogue governments capitalising on Western tolerance and their ambition to expand Western influence further east.

The jargon of "unfit people", "only the homeless and such people", "unemployed and the like" suggests that there is something worthy of reprimand in being homeless and unemployed, and reveals values and a way of thinking in Czech Government officials which democratic Europe must be shocked with. While the reduction of unemployment and the provision of housing for the homeless are among the main targets of social policy measures in most West European countries, in the Czech Republic the government is increasingly applying an old and well- remembered solution: exclusion. Surely it is easier to engage in power-politicking with the population which is already heavily infected by the virus of chauvinism and racism, especially against the Romanies, than to provide social policy directives which could have a real impact on the problem. While it is probably fair to say that it should remain within the discretion of any government to devise its social policy to cope with its problems, it certainly ought to be the concern of the entire European community of citizens when rogue governments inflict blame and punitive measures on those whose problems they are supposed to address.