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Serbia Sidelines Roma Rights Campaign

03 07 2007  ‘Decade of Roma Inclusion’ inspires much talk but little action.

By Daliborka Mucibabic in Belgrade

In a Roma settlement on the outskirts of Belgrade, yards from the luxurious Hyatt Hotel, a cardboard shack of about 10 square metres, housing three beds and a stove, is home to a Roma family of four.

One-year-old Zorica Azemovic sleeps in an improvised hammock that stretches across the flea-infested room.

Her father, Miroslav, has barely slept for months, fearing a repetition of the drama when a rat almost bit off his daughter’s ear.

“It was about 10.30pm and Zorica started crying,” he said. “I jumped out of my bed and saw her bloodied ear. She was in hospital for a week and I’ve been awake ever since.”

Rat attacks on children are a routine ordeal for the 200 or so families living in the settlement, close to Belgrade’s main motorway.

Most of the Roma living there have moved to Belgrade from the impoverished southern town of Leskovac and other areas in the south.

“A day’s work in Leskovac is enough to buy you a sack of potatoes or beans, while you can earn up to 2,000 dinars [25 euro] in Belgrade by collecting and selling scrap cardboard; that’s quite an income,” Miroslav said.

The grim living conditions that the Azemovic family puts up with are the norm for many Roma families in Serbia.

Two years ago, Serbia’s Prime Minister, Vojislav Kostunica, signed Serbia up to a regional programme aimed at improving the position of Roma throughout Central and South-east Europe.

The other countries involved in the programme are the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Croatia and Montenegro.

However, governments have taken only token steps so far to live up to the words contained in the declaration, “A Decade of Roma Inclusion 2005-2015.”

Most Roma in Serbia have never heard of the document and know nothing about how they might benefit from it.

“I don’t know what my rights are nor who to talk to,” Azemovic said.

Poor living conditions, a lack of health care and no education are the main problems the declaration is supposed to tackle.

In 2006, the Serbian government duly passed action plans aimed at improving Roma education, health care, housing and employment, allocating special funds for their implementation. The Health Ministry allocated 60 million dinars or 750,000 euros, to Roma health care, for example.

Ljuan Koka, head of the government’s secretariat for implementing the Roma Strategy plan within the Department for Human and Minority Rights, said they had made most progress over education, while efforts to lower unemployment within the community had fallen well short of the target.

“We have been able to set up working groups in various ministries and what we want to do now is to get a clear picture of who’s spending the money and how,” Koka said.

“We don’t have a political agenda, as our project is mainly financed by the OSCE mission in Serbia, while the government has given us the premises to work in,” Koka went on.

Koka admitted the position of Serbia’s Roma community remained far worse than that of the general population. Child mortality among Roma was four times higher the rate among the majority population.

Average life expectancy is only 47, compared to an average of 75 in Serbia as a whole.

Very few Serbs grow up totally illiterate, while among Roma, Koka said, “More than 75 per cent are essentially illiterate; a meagre 0.3 per cent have degrees of any kind”.

These disadvantages impact on their project prospects. Only around 27 per cent of adult Roma are economically active as opposed to almost 70 per cent of the mainstream population.

Apart from illiteracy, lack of documents is a major problem, as this prevents Roma from gaining access to local services.

Many Roma are not even registered as legal residents and have no identification cards, health records and passports.

It also means no one has a clear idea of the size of their community. While the Roma population in Serbia officially stands at 108,000 it is widely believed the real number ranges from 450,000 to 800,000.

In spite of their size, politically, they remain a marginal force. It was only at this January’s elections that candidates representing Serbia’s biggest ethnic minority won two seats in parliament for the first time. These were Rajko Djuric, head of Serbia’s Roma Union, and Srdjan Sajn, leader of the Roma Party.

Djuric said the prevalent anti-Roma sentiment in Serbia reflected the general climate of racism in the country. He blamed the community’s plight on a lack of political will for and said the government still treated Roma problems as a second-class issue.

“The future is bleak for all of us unless Serbia becomes a more democratic society and takes a decisive step to curb right-wing extremism,” Djuric said.

Sajn maintains that if progress is to be made towards meeting goals by the 2015 target date, an effort needs to be made in setting up an institutional framework for the campaign, assembling competent staff and building a non-government sector capable of addressing the problem

“The current funds are being misspent as many people have joined the Roma integration project for their own personal benefit,” Sajn complained.

During the run-up to the January elections, Sajn’s Roma Party promised to provide 500 apartments for the neediest families, find jobs for 10,000 people and allocate 50 million dinars from the state budget to aid Roma students and teachers.

“We have to see concrete results this year and we will only support the government if it clearly defines the measures it intends to take in that direction,” Sajn said.

Koka said the election of two Roma deputies was a step forward but would not resolve their problems alone. “One or two deputies can’t change anything, while they can easily cancel each other out if they end up supporting rival camps in parliament,” he pointed out.

Bozidar Jaksic, a sociologist, said the position of the Roma community was made more difficult by the fact that, like other ethnic groups in Serbia, they tended to rally only behind narrowly defined “ethnic” issues.

“Their diverse culture is their greatest wealth and not a handicap,” Jaksic said.

Jaksic said he saw the integration formula as a cliché, bearing in mind that Roma had lived in the region for centuries; what they needed was not “integration” but emancipation.

“The sole purpose of the integration story is to turn the Roma into something they are not,” he went on.

As the legal successor of the former Serbia-Montenegro state union, Serbia has inherited the old state’s international human rights commitments, which include its obligations to the Roma community.

Serbia is also a member of the European Human Rights and Civil Liberties Convention on protecting national minorities and the European Charter on minority and regional languages.

While in theory these commitments and Serbia’s constitution guarantee Roma rights, in practice, according to Roma journalist Dragoljub Ackovic, discrimination is alive and well and even getting worse.

In some ways, he went on, the position of Roma had markedly deteriorated.

“We even had our own newspaper until 1935 while now we no longer have our own media outlet,” he noted.

The Serbian broadcasting agency had recently banned the Roma Amaro Dom television and Krlo e Romego radio stations, he went on.

Although Roma groups protested to the justice minister, the broadcasting agency insisted the stations did not fulfill basic technical and staffing criteria for the renewal of their licenses.

“All our effort to get air time on Belgrade state television have also been fruitless,” Ackovic continued.

Now the community’s hopes are increasingly pinned on the EU, which Serbia hopes eventually to join.

Countries aspiring to join the European club have to incorporate an anti-discrimination law into their constitutions.

Late last year, a draft bill was presented to the Serbian parliament though it still has not been passed.

Daliborka Mucibanic is a freelance reporter from Belgrade. Balkan Insight is BIRN's online publication.