Once, I asked my colleague, a young and very professional speech therapist, to review a thesis by a Roma student whom I supervised. The research for the thesis pointed to the positive role of bilingualism in the speech development of preschool Roma children. My colleague rejected my request, claiming: “I cannot be fair – I hate the Roma because they destroyed our perfect system of special education.” This echo of the institutionalized lie concerning special education and other realms of politics of disability is not an exception among scholars and practitioners, even those only in their twenties and thirties. The outcomes of recent activities targeted at disclosing structural violence against people with disabilities and ethnic minorities remain negated by Czech and Slovak professional communities, whose members directly participated in establishing, legitimizing and practicing extreme forms of surveillance over people with disabilities and the Roma. Despite their crucial role in perpetrating institutional violence, educators, helping professionals, anthropologists and geneticists have not performed the task of truth-seeking concerning the history of the violation of human rights. The core meaning of transitional justice, the attainment of the sense of justice lost in the past, is still unapproachable for postsocialist communities of perpetrators, the main target groups of political regret.

The task of overcoming the “bad” past of Czechoslovakia where people with disabilities and the Roma were placed into institutions, sterilized and exposed to other tough forms of surveillance mainly operates as a part of the international agenda, while professionals (except the very recent attempts by a few Czech and Slovak historians) avoid undertaking activities that would lead toward possible reconciliation.