Bulgarian Roma face identity crisis

By Paul Jeffrey

Published in response magazine May 2013.

            A lot has changed for Bulgaria’s Roma during the 70 years since Anka Kostov was born. As a child, her family traveled from town to town with other Roma, also known as Gypsies, earning their way with everything from shoeing horses to telling fortunes. It was the way Roma had lived for centuries, but it came to an end when the Bulgarian Communist Party decided to outlaw nomadism in 1958. Her family was forced to settle down in Burgas, a fishing port and industrial city along the Black Sea.

            Historians call this forced sedentarization the “Great Halt.” Similar programs were launched by communist governments in Romania, Checkoslvakia, and Poland in an attempt to do away with separate ethnic and national identities. The Roma were pushed to assimilate, but long-standing cultural differences–and prejudices–don’t disappear overnight.

            The government made assimilation attractive in that it provided steady employment and schooling, something many Roma today look back on with fondness.

            “During communism we had money, food and jobs. The children all went to school. We thought only people in the western world had to look for food in the trash, but now we have to do that ourselves,” said Ms. Kostov, who spends her days searching for food and recyclable materials in dumpsters around the city. She mostly searches in the suburbs, saying the police hassle her in the center of town where the tourists might see her.

            Ganime Makmovida lives on the same dirt street as Ms. Kostov in the Gorno Ezerovo neighborhood. Ms. Makmovida, 68, is a member of the United Methodist Church. She worked as a cleaning lady under communism and still earns a very small pension today. But when the city decided to knock down her simple home to build a new road, she moved into her children’s already crowded house. She hates going out to scavenge, because it exposes her to harsh discrimination. Despite the communists’ best efforts at constructing a homogeneous state, the taunts shouted at the Roma by other Bulgarians belie the success of decades of racial engineering. And for Ms. Makmovide, even after a lifetime of discrimination, the words still sting.

            “They hate us. They hate the Roma, because we are different. We have no opportunities to work, so we go to the city to look for food, going from trash bin to trash bin, and the people are uncomfortable when they see us. Our presence makes them uncomfortable. Sometimes they try to catch us and do violence against us, and other times they sic their dogs on us and we have to run,” she said.

            Another neighbor, Yanka Petronovah, says when the Roma are yelled at, they keep quiet, as it could be dangerous to respond. “We keep silent. Otherwise they become more aggressive and violent. We just carry our pain inside,” she said.

Elastic identity

            Ms. Petronovah may be silent, but she’s unbent. “Despite all of that mistreatment, we are proud to be Roma. I’m proud because God made me this way. But it’s difficult. They’ve destroyed several of my houses, and today my husband and I live in a tent. We are ten who live in it, and no one has work. It’s a difficult time,” she said.

            It’s precisely that difficulty that has led many Roma in Bulgaria to pretend to be something else. Pursuing racial anonymity, significant numbers of Roma have recast themselves as “Turkish-speaking Bulgarians” or as a “Romanian-speaking minority group.” With skin that is usually darker than most Bulgarians, and facial features that can be distinctive, this self-misrepresentation was the only way to survive in a society which has developed extreme hatred for the Roma. And it’s not a new phenomenon; the Roma’s elastic sense of identity has proved useful for centuries.

            “We are in fact Roma. Yet the Roma are usually at the edge of society, and society denies the Roma people. Their attitude is that the Roma are bad. So the majority of Roma claim to be something else, like Bulgarians or Turks or Romanians, not Roma at all,” said Gulten Murat, a 60-year old woman in Dobric.

            Demir Sandev, a 57-year old Turkish-speaking Roma man who recycles scrap for a living in the city of Varna, says pretending to be someone else does little good. “Sometimes people claim they are Bulgarians simply because that’s the country where they live. But it’s obvious, you can see that some people are Roma. I prefer to say openly that I am Roma, because they’re going to beat me anyway,” said Mr. Sandev, a United Methodist.

            Cultural morphing in order to survive in Bulgaria’s racist society often focuses on language. Thus by speaking a different language than Romani, the Roma somehow become not Roma, at least to outsiders. But the Rev. Daniel Topalski, superintendent of the United Methodist Church in Bulgaria and Romania, says that altered language has wrought deeper cultural changes.

            “Language is an expression of a particular way of thinking, a particular mentality or philosophy of life. It’s a real expression of a people’s reality, but language can also change that reality. God said something, and it happened. And we were made in that same image. So through the acceptance of the Turkish or Romanian language, the Roma and Gypsy people change their own mentality, step by step. They learned that if they presented themselves in a different way, they would be treated better. But they in fact also changed as a result,” he said.

            Mr. Topalski suggests that Roma who have self-identified as Turkish, for example, are usually more industrious. He says that Turkish-speaking Roma ministers in the church are “more effective, better organized and have clearer goals about their ministries, while the Bulgarian-speaking among them are more like us, sometimes lazy and not very efficient and without very clear goals.”

            Several dozen families of the “Romanian-speaking minority” live in the village of Staro Oriahovo. Like one historic subgroup of Roma, they earn their living gathering herbs and mushrooms in the fields and forest. Yet they don’t want to be confused with the Roma.

            “From the Bulgarians’ perspective, we are also Gypsies, but we disagree. There are a lot of minority groups, yet the Bulgarians lump us all together as Gypsies,” said Stiliyana Vassileva.

            According to Janko Jankov, the United Methodist local pastor in the village, there are clear differences.

            “The Roma people have a different mentality. They like to steal and do other illegal things. It’s in their blood. The Romanian-speaking population is different. We are people who like to work and earn our money not by stealing but by collecting herbs and mushrooms. We understand very well that the respect of others towards us depends on our behavior. We want to be an equal part of this society and to behave as do all the others,” he said.

            Yet when interviewed along with several members of his congregation, Mr. Jankov admitted common historic roots. “We were a Gypsy tribe and when we came to Romania many centuries ago, we learned their language trying to be like them. We worked as miners there, and when we came to Bulgaria became known for the wooden plates we produced. To be honest, we are Romanian-speaking Gypsies,” he said, provoking a howl of outrage from several of his parishioners.

Roma renamed

            The government has encouraged such identity shifts for various minority groups at several points in Bulgaria’s history. In the case of the Roma, the communists at least allowed them to officially exist for a while; the 1947 Constitution guaranteed them status as an officially-recognized national minority and protected their language. Such privileges were scrapped in the revised Constitution of 1971, however, when everyone in the country was “made equal,” like it or not. From 1978 on, no official mention could be made of the Roma in the media. Eventually, in 1984 the Communist Party even banned the Romani language and Roma music from the country. That lasted until socialism fell apart at the end of 1989.

            One product of Bulgaria’s formal rejection of ethnicity was to change people’s names. Those with Turkish or Roma names, for example, woke up one morning with new Bulgarian names provided by the state. The changeover was so complete that even the names chiseled on tombstones were altered.

            Thus Gulten Murat became Galena Ilieva, the name that today appears on her official identity card.

            “It was one of the stupidest things the government did,” she said. “They did many good things. During communism the police came to make the kids go to school. Everyone had a job, and at work we treated each other well. Yet they never really explained why they changed our names, and I still don’t think they had the right,” she said.

            After the collapse of communism people could get their old names back, provided they paid a fee. Ms. Murat hasn’t done so, and says she’s now accustomed to having both names. Two of her children changed back to their Turkish/Roma names, while two other children decided to retain their Bulgarian names.

            In Varna, Mehmed Ramadan Mehmed–whose Islamic name suggests things weren’t all that different during almost five centuries of Turkish rule–doesn’t have an identity card, and can’t get one because he doesn’t have a permanent address. “Whenever I go to ask about an ID card, they ask for my property papers. I don’t have any, so they tell me to go away,” he said.

            Mr. Ramadan Mehmed is the keyboardist at the neighborhood’s United Methodist Church. His pastor, Mehmed Stefanov, says the lack of identification starts a chain of exclusion.

            “Without an ID, there’s no work or social assistance, because without an ID you are nobody. You need an address certificate to get an ID, but if your house isn’t legal, you can’t get a certificate. Without an ID, you can’t get married. If you can’t get married, your children aren’t legal either, so they can’t go to school. Children want to go to school, however, so we’ve held classes in the church, but we had to stop for lack of funds,” the pastor said.

            Mr. Ramadan Mehmed and his wife Feride (who has an official ID but it dubs her Frosko, a Bulgarian name) have been forced by anti-Roma violence to move several times in recent years. In 2011, they were chased out of their home in another Varna neighborhood when a right-wing nationalistic party, spouting dire warnings about apocalyptic Roma birth rates, called for the destruction of “Roma ghettoes.” It teamed up with skinheads and motorcycle gang members, known locally as “rockers,” to physically drive Roma families out of their homes in informal squatter settlements. The violence was encouraged on SKAT, a television channel with links to Ataka–the far-right nationalist Attack Political Party.

            “They came at midnight, and were very well organized. It was the rockers and the police, cooperating together. They beat me. We had to flee for our lives,” said Mr. Ramadan Mehmed. “It happened in many places.”

            The anti-Roma rioters, often shouting slogans like “Gypsies into soap” and “Turks under the knife,” were spurred into action when a family member of Kiril Rashkov, a Roma crime boss known widely as “Tsar Kiro,” ran a minibus over a white Bulgarian, killing him. Post-communist Bulgaria has more than its share of local crime bosses, and the government has faced years of criticism from the European Union for failing to reform its ineffective judicial system and for not prosecuting any high-level crime figures or corrupt state officials. Popular anger about the corruption runs deep, and when mixed with ethnic hatred, the traffic death sparked a conflagration in which the violence grew so bad that the police were eventually forced to switch sides and protect the Roma communities.

            Mr. Ramadan Mehmed and his wife and children took refuge in the United Methodist Church building, where they stayed for a year before moving into a small house down the hill. They pay 50 Bulgarian lev a month, about $35, an amount that’s difficult to pay on their earnings from recycling. They worry they’ll soon be chased out again, given rumors that a wealthy business consortium has bought the land and plans to develop it into upscale houses and offices. “We’d like to find a better place to live, but the only places we can afford are also illegal,” said Mr. Ramadan Mehmed.

            In 2012 the European Court of Human Rights, in what Amnesty International called a “landmark judgment,” ruled that the planned eviction of several Roma families from an established community outside of Sofia, the country’s capital, violated their right to life. Despite the government’s argument that the settlements’ makeshift homes lacked building permits, were unsafe and unhygienic, the Court ordered Bulgaria to change its eviction law to insure that the rights of vulnerable populations, especially the elderly and children, were protected during such removals. It was a small legal victory for the Roma, but paled by comparison to the mounting racism in Bulgaria.

“None of the girls has come back”

            The abject poverty of the Roma in Bulgaria has pushed some to seek a better life in western Europe, a change in scenery facilitated by Bulgaria’s admission to the European Union in 2007. But in Germany, France, Italy and elsewhere, many have often found the same racist attitudes they thought they left behind.

            Some young Roma women have gone west as victims of trafficking. Mr. Stefanov says three female members of his church, ages 17 and 18, were essentially sold by their families to traffickers. “If there’s no work, the families are tempted by this. The government supports this by not doing anything to stop it. We talked with the police and the local government, but got nowhere. And none of the girls has come back,” he said. The congregation would like to advocate more forcefully around trafficking issues, but the pastor says most families are too busy just surviving.

            In Dobric, Ms. Murat and other members of the United Methodist congregation started a children’s feeding program in 2011. Every day as many as 40 children come to the church for a simple meal. “When we have meat or dessert, there are even more kids,” Ms. Murat said. “Somehow they just know without us having to say anything.”

            The congregation, whose members are all poor themselves, finances the project without any outside help. It all started, Ms. Murat says, when their pastor, Mr. Stefanov, who is also pastor of the Roma congregation in Varna, and his wife used some of their own money to prepare a meal for hungry children. Soon it was the congregation’s project.

            “The families here are so poor that many of the children don’t go to school because their families have no money for clothes and school supplies. Some of their parents are in prison. I’d like to start an educational project for them, for both children and adults. They’re illiterate, so if they get sick and go to the hospital, they don’t even know which door to knock on because they can’t read,” he said.

            Mr. Topalski, the superintendent, says the ministries of Roma congregations are a model for the larger church.

            “They are poor, and they sacrifice from their very limited resources. It’s amazing,” he said. “They are the real church. The church is called to be close to the people, the people in need in its neighborhood. And these people are doing just that.”

Paul Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary and senior correspondent for response.