The gray barrier evokes the West Bank or Cold War Berlin: a 500-foot-long, 7-foot-high concrete wall that separates a Roma ghetto from the neatly manicured homes of gadzos, or white people, on the other side. 'Why didn't they use the money to help improve our homes instead of building a wall?' asked Alena Kalejova, 22, staring out of her freezing mud hut at the wall, erected with $17,500 of public money. A powerful stench from the piles of soiled diapers, cigarette butts and rotting food strewn outside wafted into her makeshift home, which lacks running water. Her sickly toddler, Daniela, lay motionless on a rusty cot. Ales, a visiting 12-year-old neighbor, smiled nervously as the subject turned to the wall. 'We can't steal apples anymore,' he said, staring down at the dirt floor. In this poor rural village in eastern Slovakia, as in much of the region, the Roma -- who arrived on the continent from South Asia centuries ago -- eke out an existence on society's fringes. Blighted by poverty, alcoholism and unemployment levels of around 80 percent, many lack basic skills, the consequence, human rights groups say, of decades in which many Roma children have been sent to special schools for the mentally handicapped, regardless of their intellectual capacity. The controversy over the wall, which was erected in October, comes as the global financial crisis is helping to fuel a regionwide backlash against minorities, including the Roma, as citizens look for scapegoats to help explain their economic woes. Slovakia has an estimated 380,000 Roma, widely known as Gypsies, according to rights groups. In Ostrovany, 1,200 of the 1,786 residents are Roma, a fact that critics of the wall say makes a state-financed barrier separating the majority from the minority all the more unjust. 'It is wrong to use public finances to reinforce segregation,' said Stanislav Daniel, a Roma human rights leader in the community. 'The wall sends the wrong message: that separating people from each other is the answer to solving social problems.' But Cyril Revak, the soft-spoken mayor of Ostrovany for the past 19 years, insisted that the barrier, which he called a fence, was a last resort aimed at stopping vandalism and theft. The Roma, he said, were stealing fruits and vegetables from neighbors' gardens bordering the settlement, which was illegally built on private land. When the neighbors erected metal fences to protect their properties, he said, the Roma stole those, too, selling them as scrap metal. 'The Roma are not closed off like in a zoo, and they have access to the village from both sides,' Revak said, stressing that public finances were also used to help the Roma. 'But if citizens want rights,' he added, 'they also have to accept responsibilities.' It is hard to find defenders of the Roma among the neighbors bordering the camp, many of them elderly. Most were unapologetic. Others expressed anger. Imrich Telesnicky, 62, a retired brewery worker, whose handsome stone house sits on the other side of the wall, said he would have built a wall 650 feet high if given the chance. 'The Roma don't want to work, they have no discipline,' he said. 'If you steal, you have to pay the consequences.' Tensions in Roma communities are on the rise in other countries in Eastern Europe and in Italy. In Hungary, at least seven Roma have been killed in the last two years, and Roma leaders have counted about 30 firebomb attacks. In the Czech Republic, a small Roma child was severely burned in April 2009 after assailants threw gas bombs into her home in the town of Vitkov, in northern Moravia. Here in Slovakia, far-right extremists organized anti-Roma demonstrations in August after two young Roma men from Ostrovany nearly beat to death Stefan Pindroch, a 65-year-old caretaker at a football stadium in the neighboring town of Sarisske Michalany, gouging out one of his eyes when he tried to stop them from stealing a television. Sociologists said that crimes like these -- widely publicized in the Slovak media -- had helped to tarnish the Roma with a reputation for lawlessness in a small, predominantly Catholic country where they had long been considered outsiders. In a survey in 2008 by the Institute for Public Affairs in Bratislava, 70 percent of those interviewed said they would object to having Romany neighbors. Plans are under way to build several separation barriers near other Roma communities in Slovakia. 'The Roma are easy targets as 'the other' because they are weak and vulnerable,' said Olga Gyarfasova, program director at the institute. Whatever the institutionalized discrimination against the Roma, social workers and Roma leaders say the Roma must overcome a victim's mentality if they want to break the vicious cycle of social exclusion. Marian Trisc, a former police officer and social worker, who is volunteering in the Roma settlement in Ostrovany, attributed the dire conditions to a mixture of social prejudices and a Romany culture that he said did not value work. He said that local factories had tried to employ Roma, but that many employers had given up when the Roma failed to show up for work. He said it was hard to motivate Roma to work when individuals could earn more living off of state social welfare benefits -- about $230 a month for a family with two children. Roma advocates said this was an unfair stereotype, stressing that a rising middle class of Roma was emerging across Europe. The biggest challenge confronting the Roma is the lack of adequate education, Trisc said. Nearly 100 Roma children from the settlement attend a nearby school for mentally handicapped children, he noted, even though many of them have no disabilities. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2007 that sending Roma children to special schools violated their rights to a full education, but rights groups complain that little has changed. Trisc lamented that at the camp, many Roma, with limited education and work prospects, relied on loans from unscrupulous Roma loan sharks, who charged 100 percent interest rates. When government welfare checks arrive each month at the local post office, he said, hundreds of indebted Roma families immediately turn them over to the loan sharks, who wait with large shopping bags nearby. Roma leaders acknowledged that such practices reinforced prejudices -- and helped erect walls, imagined and real. 'Slovaks perceive the Roma as a kind of natural disaster from which they must protect themselves,' said Klara Orgovanova, director of the Roma Institute in Bratislava, who herself is a Roma. 'That is why they built that wall.' 