Out of Sight: Evictions in Serbia keep Roma at the margins

By Paul Jeffrey

Published by response magazine May 2013.

            Milan Pesic used to earn a living pushing a cart around downtown Belgrade, gleaning plastic, paper and recyclable metals from dumpsters. Every evening he pushed his cart back to his ramshackle house in a squatter settlement in the Belvil neighborhood. Like his neighbors, Mr. Pesic is Roma, who are also known as Gypsies, among whom recycling is a common vocation. Yet many in Serbia’s bustling capital city saw the stacks of junk and the houses made of scrap as an eyesore, and pressured local authorities to kick the Roma off the land so it could be developed into modern office parks and apartment complexes.

            In April 2012, Mr. Pesic, his wife and their five children were evicted from Belvil and moved by city authorities into a metal shipping container in the town of Makis, on the edge of Belgrade. Although it’s unbearably hot in the summer and unheated in Serbia’s frigid winter, the shipping container has at least kept the family dry. “Our house in Belvil leaked everywhere. It was as if we lived outside,” said Mr. Pesic’s wife Gordana.

            Although dry, their new “house” has created some problems. There’s no room for Mr. Pesic’s tuba, which he played in a Roma band that got frequent gigs at weddings and parties. He has to store it with a relative for now, and he misses the income. He also isn’t earning anything from recycling, because the rules of the new container settlement prohibit recycling. Even having a push cart could get him kicked out.

            Yet Mr. Pesic doesn’t miss the abusive comments that some would yell at him as he pushed his cart around the city. The most ironic insult he frequently got was “Go back to Kosovo!” from people who assumed he was one of thousands of Roma, many of them Muslims, who were expelled from the breakaway republic during fighting at the end of the 1990s. But Mr. Pesic and his family were born in Serbia and speak Serbian to each other, although they also know one of the several dozen dialects of Romani spoken in today’s Europe. And they are Orthodox Christians, though religious identity for many Roma is a flexible concept. Writes Isabel Fonseca in Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, the Roma are often irreligious, “adopting the going faith as it suits them, in the hopes of avoiding persecution and possibly of reaping whatever benefits membership might bring.” More important than religious identity, she suggests, is the Romas’ “powerful sense of tribe.”

            It’s that sense of tribe that brought the Roma together in Belvil, and which unites the some 70 families living in Masik’s containerville, one of three sites to where Belvil evictees were relocated. Belgrade officials have talked about a more permanent housing project for them, but no one is getting their hopes up. It was the second eviction for Mr. Pesic’s family. They’d been kicked out of another neighborhood four years before and moved to Belvil as a result. He has no long-range plans. For now, the city succeeded in getting them out of sight, so the container is their home for the immediate future. To earn money now, Mr. Pesic rides a bus for an hour to a river where he catches fish to sell to restaurants.

Evictions all across Europe

            All across Europe, evictions of families from Roma settlements have increased. With the admission of countries like Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria to the European Union in 2007, Roma are free to travel to western European countries. (Serbia’s membership is in process.) With Roma unemployment rates in eastern Europe alarmingly high (73 percent in Romania, for example), and school completion rates shockingly low (only 32 percent of Roma children in Romania complete primary school), and with hate speech and racist violence on the rise, it’s not surprising that families would migrate westward. Yet in the European Union freedom to travel hasn’t meant freedom to work, at least not yet, so Roma migrants end up sharing their new life clustered together in informal settlements that local authorities often view as unsightly and unsafe. The common solution has been to evict Roma families, dismantle the camps and deport the residents back east, hoping they’ll go away and become someone else’s problem.

            That was the approach of France’s former president Nicolas Sarkozy, and it was sharply criticized by many on the left, including his successor, François Hollande. Yet the new Socialist president, sworn in to office in May 2012, ended up acting much like his right-wing predecessor. In July and August of 2012, 22 Roma camps, where about 2,300 people lived, were torn down across France. That provoked an outcry from rights activists.

            “Repeated forced evictions have disastrous consequences on the Roma’s health, education and ability to secure an adequate standard of living. Forced out of one informal settlement after another they end up in ever poorer housing conditions, forced to sleep on the streets and in tents until they manage to build another makeshift home,” said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International’s Europe and Central Asia program director. “During forced evictions, they often lose their belongings, identity papers and medical records; in many cases schooling is disrupted and medical treatment is interrupted, while ties to local employment and support networks are severed. Yet, under French law they do not receive adequate reparation.”

            In cases where alternative housing is made available by the government, evicted families are usually transported to another authorized camp on the erroneous assumption that all Roma want to live in camps. Yet such settlements, like La Barbuta, a segregated Roma camp that opened alongside Rome’s Ciampino airport in June 2012, are typically in remote areas, far from services, effectively cutting Roma families off from the rest of society.

            Amnesty International criticized Belgrade authorities for the forcible evictions in Belville in April 2012, and the subsequent eviction in September 2012 of 15 of those same families from an abandoned Belgrade factory. Because they had no residence papers for Belgrade, after the April eviction the government had sent them off to remote villages in the south of the country. Unable to find work there, they had soon returned to Belgrade. Amnesty International said such relocation was “not a sustainable solution,” and it violated the Roma’s right to freedom of movement and residence under international conventions that Serbia has signed.

They will eventually have to leave

            Mirjana Memetovic is one of the Roma expelled from Belvil who couldn’t even get a container. Her husband was in jail for driving without a license and she had no official identity papers with a Belgrade address, although she’d lived in the capital for 12 years, so officials took her and her three daughters to Bojnik, a village in the south of the country where she was born. She had no reason to stay there, so worked in the fields for two weeks, earning enough for four bus tickets back to Belgrade. She built a simple shack of scrap materials near a dozen other poor Roma families in the Belgrade suburb of Palilula. Yet another informal Roma settlement was born.

            Her closest neighbors are Sofija Arbanac and her husband Vita Stankovic. Along with their two girls, they were also evicted from Belvil but lived in a container in Makis for a while. Mr. Stankovic got in several fights with his neighbors, however, and they were kicked out. Today their bare dwelling in Palilula hosts a mattress and not much more. At least Mr. Stankovic can park his recycling cart there, but that also means their house is surrounded by the unsightly detritus that’s the unavoidable byproduct of artisan recycling, and which inevitably triggered a warning from local officials of yet another imminent eviction. Ms. Arbanac knows they’ll eventually have to leave, but doesn’t know when. Meanwhile, she contributes to the family’s meager income by scavenging for bread in the garbage. If it doesn’t have any telltale mold, she repackages it to sell on the street.

            Ms. Memetovic also earns a bit of income from recycling, as well as from begging at a nearby McDonalds. She takes her girls with her everywhere. “I’d love to send them to a preschool, but I can’t afford it,” she says. There’s a free preschool for Roma children run by Church World Service in the Makis container settlement, and she could get there by bus, but she says her husband wouldn’t like the idea of her traveling so far from their meager home.

“Daily struggle because I can’t read”

            The Church World Service preschool is itself housed in a container, which the U.S.-based organization converted into a school. By day it’s filled with kids, and in the evening the adults take over the space for a literacy class. Gordana Pesic is one of the students.

            “I didn’t finish primary school, but I can read and write a bit. I’d like to learn math so maybe one day I can get a regular job,” she said.

            Her husband is supportive, but skeptical. “It’s hard to get your first job at her age, especially when you have little children,” he said.

            Ms. Pesic is realistic, but nonetheless hopeful. “I still want to try, but I’m not going to waste much time thinking I’m going to get a job,” she said.

            When they lived in Belvil, the couple’s children attended the Branko Pesic School, a program for Roma children supported by Church World Service. In Makis, their older children attend a nearby government school, but their oldest daughter was placed in a “special education” program, a common occurrence with Roma children throughout the region which has been widely criticized by Roma activists.

            The Branko Pesic School is located in Belgrade’s Zemun Polje Roma settlement, and offers preschool, primary education, as well as adult primary education classes.

            Giltena Duda is a student there. She’s 33, pregnant with her seventh child, and came to Belgrade a decade ago from Kosovo. She and her family first lived in a house made of cardboard, but in 2008 moved into Zemun Polje. They built a house on land they don’t own and pirated their electricity from nearby power lines. Because as refugees from Kosovo they don’t have legal residency in Belgrade, their kids can’t go to regular schools. It’s a common problem. According to one study, less than one quarter of Roma children in Serbia finish elementary school, and only 10 percent graduate from high school. Many adults are illiterate.

            That’s why Branko Pesic School was founded, and why Ms. Duda sends her children there. And since 2010, Ms. Duda has herself been a student there, joining other Roma adults in an evening class. From Monday to Thursday it’s primary level subjects, and on Friday evening it’s a class in life skills.

            “I had to leave school in the second grade, because my family moved around a lot, but I always wanted to learn, so I tried again later. Three times I went to first grade, and then I finally gave up,” she said.

            “It’s a daily struggle because I can’t read. Even reading street signs to know where I’m going is difficult. And it’s hard to find a job if I can’t fill out the forms. I’d like to find a job as a cleaning woman or in the hospital,” she said.

            Ms. Duda is glad her children are students at Branko Pesic School, saying they’d never survive in a regular Serbian classroom. Yet she also wants them to master the Serbian language and be able to navigate their way through the dominate culture.

            “They have to survive in the world, but I also want them to be proud to be Roma. I’m glad I’m Roma, even if the outside world hates me for it. I want my children to feel the same,” she said.

“Same old blame from the east to west”

            Roma pride can be a powerful antidote to the rise in discrimination against the Roma in recent years. That this often involves music is no surprise, given that over the centuries of Roma migration, they often earned their keep by providing music wherever they stopped. Today’s Roma music remains supranational, cutting across arbitrary cultural, ethnic and national boundaries. The Rev. Daniel Topalski, the superintendent of the United Methodist Church in Bulgaria and Romania, calls Roma music “the Esperanto of the Balkans.”

            A group of Roma youth in Serbia has taken this to a new level, mixing traditional Roma music with contemporary hip hop to produce a show that has energized the Belgrade cultural scene. They’ve taken the show on the road to other European and Canadian cities, and played in New York City’s Lincoln Center in 2012. They’re called GRUBB–Gypsy Roma Urban Balkan Beats–and their song Dosta Sine-“Enough already”–describes the challenging context the Roma face.

It’s about time for our suffering to end,
For a normal life where we don’t have to fend,
We want jobs, the real deal, not washing windshields,
Not collectin’ cardboard with a cart with one wheel,
Going through life getting a raw deal,
Or getting thrown in jail because they say we steal,
Selling pirate disks just to get a meal,
Don’t try to say this segregation’s not real.

And why does the whole world think that we are pests?
It’s the same old blame from the east to west,
Livin’ in a mess while the rest are blessed,
Gettin’ by with less than they spend getting dressed.

It’s enough bigotry, when we walk down the street,
People think we’re filthy, that we’re dirty gypsies,
But it’s time they see, just how great we can be,
Once we become free from this partiality.

            In their song Roma Sijam–“We are Roma”–the youth in GRUBB define the solution as coming from within the Roma themselves.

We’re sick of living with a bad reputation,
Fighting insults with our songs, Proving stereotypes wrong.
It’s time the world respects the Roma nation.
Say it loud, we are proud to be Roma, no doubt.
I was raised a Rom, I’m not ashamed,
I was raised a Rom, Roma is our name!

We live as Roma, We live as Roma, as Roma we will die!
You wouldn’t believe what we’ve seen in our lives,
We suffered too much, they’ve persecuted us,
For our people, life is rough, our days are tough,
We’ve had enough, now we want to live,
To show the world what we have to give,
We live as Roma, We live as Roma, as Roma we will die!

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