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Rosa, Rubie and Ruska: New Homes Don’t Bring New Lives

17 07 2007  Several years after Plovdiv Roma families were moved to a new estate, lessons need to be drawn from the failure of this experiment in social engineering.

By Ekaterina Terzieva in Plovdiv

“They made us demolish our house ourselves,” Rosa Kostadinova recalls, resting her elbows on a walnut table in the middle of her living room. “When they came and said they would move us out, we got very scared.”

Kostadinova is recalling the day in 2003 when her family was moved from their self-made shack into a spacious two-storey, white painted, family home. They got it for a rent of only 26 leva [13 euro] a month.

It should have been a happy ending. But it wasn’t. Several years on, the life of the resettled families is proof of the failure of this experiment in social engineering.

The Kostadinovi are one of several dozen Roma families who became part of a local authority drive to integrate families from Sheker Mahala, the oldest Roma district of Plovdiv, into mainstream society.

But far from being integrated, their community remains as distant from non-Roma Bulgarians as before.

The municipality took a unilateral decision to destroy their small houses and shacks, many of which had been built illegally, and move the families to 80 new houses.

The move, made without any consultation with the Roma community, was well intentioned. But the municipality did little to guarantee employment for the resettled Roma, a community blighted by the worst unemployment rate in Bulgaria - 60 per cent, compared to less then 9 for the country as a whole.

The project also fuelled ethnic tension. Poor non-Roma families complained that the Roma were benefiting from excessive positive discrimination.

Sunk in poverty and alienation, the neighbourhood today seems as locked in the same knot of problems as other members of the diverse Roma communities in Bulgaria.
Kostadinova says her family are all unemployed. Her neighbour, Rubie Kadirova, seems to be doing better. She holds down three jobs, netting 300 leva [150 euro] a month to sustain her family.

“I get 80 leva a month to look after an elderly man twice a week and then I work as an office cleaner for an advertisement company, where I earn another 10 leva every Monday,” she says. “I also look after the entrance to a building for 80 leva. Together with my pension of 85 leva, this all sums up to 300 leva.”

Kadirova’s two sons are also employed as unskilled workers, while her husband receives 36 leva month as social support.

“Many people from our community complain they can’t find work but they are lazy!” Kadirova insists. “I am 60 but even when I get to 70, if someone needs me, I’ll go out and work, even for 5 leva!”

But not everyone feels similarly motivated to work for such small sums, which are all that most Roma in Bulgaria are offered. “If you find a job, they offer you 180 leva but how can you sustain yourself with that?” asks Ruska Zaharieva, 47, another woman from the neighbourhood. She says she’s been constantly refused jobs on the basis of her age and ethnic origin.

The three women say that when they were asked to move to their new homes they were also promised jobs. But after they moved, nothing more was heard of employment assistance.

Now that so many of the Sheker Mahala families live on social support, few are able to maintain their new houses or make proper use of them. The 80 villas, built with Council of Europe Development Bank money, are deteriorating and starting to resemble the ghetto they left.

As many of the people are unable to pay regularly local taxes, including the one for garbage collection, litter piles up in the streets.

Homeless people have started settling between the new houses, and one can see them asleep on their mattresses, covered with old blankets and surrounded by their utensils.

In the houses themselves, the sewage system is blocked. It proved deficient within days of the families moving into their new houses. Soon, their cellars were filled with stinking water.

Unable to take care of the problem themselves, they alerted the municipality but the sewage system has not been repaired.

Last year there have been an outbreak of Hepatitis in the neighbourhood, too. Last summer, all four of Kostadinova’s children, aged five to 13, were diagnosed with the disease.

Kadirova’s family have picked up the same illness, which she blames on their environment. “Look at this street – frogs, lizards, and in the cellar everything is floating in dirty water. It stinks of dirt everywhere,” she says. “First my grandchildren got Hepatitis. Now we need to switch off the central electricity fuse to prevent them from being electrocuted.”

The women predict that if the situation remains the same, the villas will turn into ruins in a few years.

Kadirova says even her relatively well-off family could not afford to pay the garbage collection tax for years. It was only a month ago that she was forced to pay 500 leva, after receiving a threatening letter from the local prosecutor.

However low the rent and the taxes, many families find it impossible to pay them. Many cannot even collect enough money to furnish their houses.

While Kostadinova has arranged a nice living room and a decent kitchen, this is not the case with Kadirova.

“I have furnished the two upper rooms for my sons’ families but I still need to buy some furniture for the lower floor, where I stay with my husband,” she says. For now there is hardly anything in her bedroom and her bed consists of an old cover, spread on the floor.

It is all too obvious that new houses did not bring these people new lives. All that happened was that their old world was taken away.

“Many people have great difficulties living here because they are unemployed, have no motivation to adapt and have no social integration programme to rely on,” says Anton Karagyozov, a Roma leader from Plovdiv.

Krasimir Kuzmov, mayor of the mainly Roma Iztochen district in Plovdiv, agrees. “The construction of these houses was a mistake,” he says. “It showed us what not to do in future.”


Ekaterina Terzieva is a correspondent for Sega national daily from Plovdiv. She is also a regular contributor to Balkan Insight. Balkan Insight is BIRN`s online publication.

This article was created with the support of the US State Department and is part of the special package “Minorities in Bulgaria.”