Making Change: Roma in Macedonia fight for respect

By Paul Jeffrey

Published by response magazine in May 2013.

            Like many Roma in Macedonia, Ljatife Sikovska remembers a time when ethnic identity mattered much less than citizenship, when being Roma wasn’t the economic and cultural disadvantage it has become today. It was just over two decades ago, before the former Yugoslavia fell apart, when Josip Broz Tito’s version of communism held the larger federal republic together.

            “Life was better then. We were a part of the system. School wasn’t a problem. From primary school to the university, everyone could attend. The government cared about everyone. It wasn’t a problem to be Albanian or Serb or Roma. No one said anything about that. We had freedom, and people accepted and helped each other,” said Ms. Sikovska, a women’s activist in Suto Orizari, the largest Roma community in Europe. It’s located at the edge of Skopje, the capital of today’s independent Macedonia. “The question then was whether you were human or not, not your nationality. Today everything focuses on your nationality. Why do people today constantly ask me about my nationality?”

            In a land where Roma unemployment is today scandalously high, Ms. Sikovska recalls her mother’s experience. “My mother was not educated, but she had a job. She worked cleaning a school. I wasn’t ashamed to say that. We were six children, and my mother worked to support all of us, so we could get an education,” she said.

            Nostalgia for the past runs strong among Macedonia’s Roma.

            “Life was better when it was Yugoslavia. There was lots of work in those days. Today we need help from the government but it’s not listening to us. There are lots of fancy new monuments built in the center of town but there’s no money for the Roma and the poor,” said Suto Orizari resident Zuhra Redjepi.

            In Ms. Redjepi’s eyes, the last decent national leader in Macedonia was Boris Trajkovski, the country’s president from 1999 to 2004. A United Methodist, Mr. Trajkovski had studied theology in the United States and served as lay pastor of a largely Roma congregation in Macedonia before entering politics. As president he continued to attend worship at a United Methodist Church in Skopje. (I quickly discovered that giving the church’s address to taxi drivers in Skopje led us to routinely get lost, but if I simply asked to go to “Boris Trajkovski’s church,” the taxi driver would nod and take me directly there.)

            Mr. Trajkovski died in a plane crash in nearby Herzegovina in 2004, when he was on his way to an economic conference in Mostar. The plane flew into a mountain in the middle of a storm. It was most likely an accident, but Ms. Redjepi doesn’t buy the official story. “Boris Trajkovski was a good president. He came here and listened to us, and the government helped. He was killed because he was a believer and he cared for poor people. The bad people killed him,” she said.

            Ms. Redjepi and her husband earn money today from recycling plastic bottles they pull from dumpsters around the capital. She once worked cleaning offices and the houses of rich people, but health problems forced her to stop. Finding new work is tough for a Roma. “If you’re applying for work and put a Shutka address,” she said, using the popular slang term for Suto Orizari, “then you’ll have problems finding a job.”

            Asked about her family’s history, Ms. Redjepi rummages around in a worn plastic bag filled with aging papers until she comes up with an old identification card of her father, a member of the Resistance during World War II. It was a common calling for Roma, who fought against Hitler using the same cunning and deception that had allowed them to survive in hostile environments for centuries. Isabel Fonseca, in her book Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, writes that the Roma’s ability to lie, and to do it well, shouldn’t be understood as a character flaw. “On the whole, lying is a cheerful affair. Embellishments are intended to give pleasure. People long to tell you what they imagine you want to hear. They want to amuse you; they want to amuse themselves; they want to show you a good time. This is beyond hospitality. This is art,” she wrote.

            Not surprisingly, many Roma put their art to work at the service of the Resistance. “Their survival, over a millennium, has depended on secrecy: on disguise and misrepresentation, on keeping customs and ambitions hidden, on burying the past–on lying. The Gypsies have always been partisans,” Ms. Fonseca wrote.

“You might as well not exist”

            Initially a temporary settlement of homeless families displaced by the 1963 earthquake that ravaged Skopje, Suto Orizari slowly took on the luster of permanence as the poor realized they had nowhere else to go. Although part of the larger city of Skopje, it was formally incorporated as a municipality in 1996, and its Roma character was boosted a few years later with a fresh infusion of Roma refugees from Kosovo.

            There are some 40,000 people in Suto Orizari today. The exact number is hard to know, given that many Roma don’t have legal documentation. The same inexactitude plagues attempts to quantify the number of Roma anywhere; counting Roma is an inexact science. The German author Gunter Grass argues that Roma resist being numbered for a reason. “Experience has taught them of the injuries they and their families can be subjected to once they have been identified–which means registered,” he wrote in the foreword to The Roma Journeys, a collection of Roma photographs by Joakim Eskildsen.

            But that resistance to documentation also facilitates Roma marginalization and poverty. Thus a major part of Ms. Sikovska’s job as director of Ambrela, an NGO that seeks to empower women and children in Suto Orizari, is helping families get identification documents. As she walks the dirt streets of the settlement, women come out of their simple homes, a wad of folded papers in their hands, to ask her for help. She stops and looks the documents over, asks some questions, and files them way in what she jokes is her “filing cabinet,” a bag she carries that as the day progresses grows heavier with people’s hopes.

            “If the key to improving the life of Roma is for them to integrate better into the larger society, that’s not going to happen without documents. If you have no birth certificate, no identity card, then you might as well not exist,” she said.

            Ms. Sikovska says many Roma don’t have documents because their children were born at home. “The parents didn’t know how to go apply for a birth certificate, or they didn’t have the money to do so. And if they went to register they could encounter discrimination. Often the people working there wouldn’t or couldn’t explain well what other documents they might need,” she said. “Or because they were migrating, as many Roma families did, their children could be born on the road and by the time they came back to Skopje, they’d forget to register them.”

            Ms. Sikovska says she first works to get an identity card for the mother, then she can start on the children’s documents. It’s a slow process. Ambrela is working with the government to streamline the process, but entrenched bureaucracies are tough to change. “We’ve discussed with them how it would help if some government agencies could come to Suto Orizari to help speed up the process, but we haven’t gotten anywhere. The process remains slow at best. Meanwhile, people have no right to health care or to be part of school system if they don’t have a birth certificate. If your child gets sick and needs to see a doctor, if you don’t have their birth certificate they can’t be seen,” she said.

            As a result, some children in Suto Orizari don’t go to school, even though it’s supposedly mandatory. In other cases, the family simply can’t afford it, especially in cases where the breadwinning husband is in jail, a common problem, Ms. Sikovska says, given the disproportionally harsh sentences given to Roma compared to other Macedonians. She says parents understand the importance of education for their children, but in large families, the numbers don’t allow it.

            “It’s important for me that all children be in school, to do better than their parents and not be poor for generation after generation,” Ms. Sikovska said. “So we help with school materials and books and clothes, but even that isn’t enough sometimes. The children need something to eat in school if they’re going to be there for four or five hours. If a family is living on 30 Euros a month of government assistance, how can I tell them to give their children food to take to school when they already don’t have enough food for everyone?”

            Kids in Suto Orizari who do attend school have to crowd into their classrooms; some 2,000 attend a school that was built for 800. And the language used by teachers in the school is Macedonian, not Romani. That upsets many in Suto Orizari, where most families speak Romani.

            “In our country, Albanians, Serbians, Bosnians, and Turks all get to learn in their mother tongue. Only the Roma are forced to learn in Macedonian. That’s not fair. Our children should be able to learn in their mother tongue, but there are no Roma teachers. The government agrees that we have the right, but asks ‘Where are the teachers?’ We need to prepare some. That takes time, and we’re working on it, but the government must help,” said Ms. Sikovska.

            Throughout the region, another problem for Roma children is that an inordinate number of them are placed in special education programs. In Macedonia, Roma make up around 10 percent of the total population, but Roma children account for almost half the pupils in programs for children with learning disabilities. Critics say the substandard curriculum means children don’t progress rapidly and are stigmatized, condemning them to a working life of low-paid, menial jobs at best. Government officials blame Roma parents for gaming the system in order to gain additional social benefits given to families of such children, but a 2012 survey by the European Roma Rights Centre showed that most Roma parents in Macedonia were not given adequate and complete information about the process of testing and categorization of their children, nor were they informed of their rights to challenge the schools’ decisions.

            Ms. Sikovska says that although pressure from Roma activists has improved the situation in recent years, the unjust practice continues, often rooted in the issue of language.

            “If they ask the children questions in Macedonian, how are they supposed to answer if they don’t know the language? Parents come to me all the time and ask why their children are being sent to special schools when they aren’t disabled in any way. Our children don’t have mental health issues, they have a problem with language,” she said.

“Poverty is the enemy of education”

            Sadedin Husein liked school and wanted to go on to university, but he had to drop out of school after eighth grade because his father died and he needed to work to support his family. He worked as a seasonable farm hand and as a porter in the bus station, but the 63-year old Suto Orizari resident says life has been even tougher since Macedonia’s independence. So today he works gathering plastic bottles in Skopje. Although he works hard, what he earns barely covers any basics. Most days he skips paying the 35 denar bus fare–about 75 cents–on the way into town; paying for the round trip would virtually wipe out his profit. He jumps off the bus with his bag full of smashed bottles should a transit inspector come aboard.

            “I would have liked to stay in school longer, but life didn’t happen that way,” he said. “Poverty is the enemy of education, yet only education can change poverty.”

            Fifteen-year old Rachel Ismili wants what Mr. Husein couldn’t have, an opportunity to study in the university. She gets good grades but doesn’t know if her family will be able to come up with the 200 Euros a year she’ll need. “I’d like to become a lawyer to help my people. There are only two or three lawyers in Suto Orizari, and we need more. The Roma get pushed around too much,” she says.

            While Ms. Ismili wants to serve her people, their condition makes her question, even deny, her own identity. “I don’t want to be a Roma. I want to be an American,” she says. “That’s a big country.”

            Tired of living in the small world of Suto Orizari and frustrated at their prospects in the rest of Macedonia, many would prefer to live anywhere else. Ms. Redjepi has one son working in Italy and a daughter met a man on the internet and moved to Sweden. Her 15-year old daughter Semirah says she is determined to stay in Macedonia. She wants to go to medical school and become a pediatrician. “I don’t feel any discrimination; kids are all the same. At night we go out as a group, including some Albanian girls. If you behave well, they accept you. It doesn’t matter if you’re Roma or have dark skin and black hair,” she said.

            Erhan Feyzov is a 23-year old Suto Orizari resident studying in the university. He says his education has given him an advantage that many neighbors in the Roma settlement don’t possess.

            “Education has helped me to think differently from what my mom and dad taught me. They said that no matter how hard I work or study, that if I don’t have people in the government to help me, I won’t be able to advance. My mom and dad thought I can’t move up in life because I’m a Roma. But I proved to them that I can. I finished elementary and high school and now I’m in the university. I’m studying geography. It’s in our Roma blood to travel, to go around the world. In studying geography, I can do that,” he said.

“We need a revolution”

            Several Roma political parties exist in Macedonia; Suto Orizari even has a Roma mayor. Yet many Roma complain that such political organization has yielded few positive results. Ms. Redjepi says the local political leaders only show their faces at election time when they come bearing food for the poor. Ms. Sikovska, who admits she has thought about running for office herself, says Roma politicians lack vision.

            “When you want to help your people you must have a vision, a mission, if you’re going to push the government to do more. But our political leaders are only interested in themselves,” she said. “Where is the voice of the Roma poor? They gave their support to Roma political leaders to speak for them, but instead they are forgotten.”

            As a result, it often falls on Roma NGOs, like Ambrela, to push for change. But little changes. And Ms. Sikovska says that’s not always the government’s fault.

            “Every day we’re pushing this government to make something happen. But we Roma are too passive. We need to make democracy work for the Roma in Macedonia. We need to protest more. When we get turned away by someone in the government who doesn’t want to respond to us, we need to learn to demand to see the director, and to stay there until they deal with us,” she said.

            “We must be prepared to go into the street, to be loud, to say to the government, ‘Hello! Here we are! We are Roma and we want to live normal lives. We want to be a part of all institutions and be accepted just like other ethnic groups. Enough with the negative depictions of Roma. I am a Roma woman, I am educated, and I insist you deal with me with respect,’” she said.

            Ms. Sikovska says much of her job is coaching women and children and men to use their human rights. “We need to be strong. We need a revolution, a Roma revolution, in the Balkans. We’ve been peaceful for a long time and what do we have? Nothing. So we must fight. We need a Roma revolution, because otherwise nothing changes.”

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