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Serbia Helps Roma Students

By Romeo Mihajlovic in Novi Sad

07 12 2007  With little schooling or financial resources, it is tough for Serbia’s Roma to make it to university, but the government’s affirmative action is beginning to signal a change for the better.

In its bid to join the European Union Serbia is expanding minority rights, including those enjoyed by the Roma or Gypsies, who are widely seen as the country’s most numerous and most neglected ethnic group.

As part of that effort, the government has launched an initiative aimed at boosting the number of Roma students at the country’s universities.

Over the past 13 years only 150 Serbian Roma have enrolled at the country’s six universities where currently more than 230,000 students, in a population of 8 million, are receiving their education. The number of Roma students started to rise after 2000. In 2007 a total of 50 Roma students were enrolled within the scope of the government’s programme of affirmative action.

Petar Nikolic the head of the Matica Romska organization says that “affirmative action is a fruit of many years of struggle.

Initially it was the Roma community that was mainly involved in that struggle, and only later did other minority groups and bodies join in and offer their backing,” Nikolic says.

According to the 2001 census, there are some 180,000 Roma in Serbia, but their real numbers are believed to be much larger, and some estimates put their total at 450,000 or even more.

Fearing isolation and discrimination, many Roma declare themselves as Serbs, ethnic Bosniaks, Muslims, Hungarians or Romanians, while a number of them, who fled Serbia’s disputed Kosovo province after the 1999 war there, have never acquired IDs or other official documents.

The Roma tend to be undereducated, and almost 80 per cent are functionally illiterate, in sharp contrast to the majority Serbs and other minority groups whose officially-declared literacy rate is close to 100 per cent.

Affirmative action in relation to Roma education has a relatively short history.

It was only as recently as 2002 that the Law on the Protection of Minority Rights was passed, stipulating that a Roma student who passes the entrance exam and the threshold required for state-subsidized studies may then qualify for scholarships and free or low-rent accommodation on campuses.

“The quality of higher education for the Roma is of the utmost importance, not only for the Roma community but for society at large,”
Nikolic says.

Another two bodies, the Roma Minority National Council and the state-run Office for Roma National Strategy, are also involved in the effort to promote Roma education.

However, many officials are not aware of the Roma education policies.

Nikola Cubrilo, the top student official at Novi Sad University in Serbia’s north says he is “not familiar with government policy” on Roma education programmes, other than the fact that “Roma students are subsidized by the state, and that they have accommodation provided for them on campuses.”

Cubrilo says he supports the policy, but adds that he has not been “informed about its scope and success” and about the readiness of “Serbia’s academic society to see an increase in the number of Roma students.”

“We are working with two Roma students to help their integration into our environment,” he says.

Aleksandar Dinic, a Roma student who studies law at the same university praises the government action because “without it, I would not be able to continue my studies in Novi Sad, as I am from Vranje,” a far-away town in Serbia’s south.

“Apart from being allowed to register, I was given free accommodation and I received scholarships from the Education Ministry and the Open Society Institute in Budapest,” he said.

Another office that helps in the effort is the Novi Sad-based Roma Inclusion Office. Its head, Dusko Jovanovic, told Balkan Insight that his agency’s priority was to help the initiative aimed at improving the Roma minority’s education level. The inspiration comes from the authorities at the national and international levels.

“The issue of Roma education is addressed in the international declaration, ‘A Decade of Roma Inclusion 2005-2015’, and the government’s Action Plan for Roma Education,” Jovanovic said.

In 2006, the Serbian government approved action plans aimed at improving Roma education, health care, housing and employment, allocating special funds for their implementation.

However, in an earlier interview with Balkan Insight Ljuan Koka, head of the secretariat for Roma Strategy in the government’s Department for Human and Minority Rights, said that most of the progress had been made in education, while efforts to lower unemployment within the community had fallen well short of the target.

Given the extent of discrimination and exclusion suffered by Roma in many walks of life, the modest advance made in educational provisions takes on a much greater significance. But few would deny that these are only the first, tentative steps towards ensuring educational opportunities for the Roma.

Romeo Mihajlovic is journalist with the RTV Novi Sad. Balkan Insight is BIRN`s online publication.

This article was published with the support of the British embassy in Belgrade and Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe, OSCE, mission in Serbia, as part of BIRN's Minority Media Training and Reporting Project.