The other side of segregation: Roma in Bulgaria
A bulldozer starts demolishing the first house. Or shack. Then the next one. And the next. There are orders to follow, and the job is relentless.
It’s a cloudy morning in April 2018. The weather isn’t cold or warm, but the scene feels heated. The nearby neighbours watch as one bulldozer does all the work: it destroys people’s homes, one by one. Until there’s nothing left, let alone hope. Some people have climbed on rooftops to get a better view of the scene. A lack of emotion sets the mood of the moment, as people just stand around and watch with resignation. The heavy police presence does the rest: there isn’t much the neighbours can do to resist.
The demolition hasn’t come as a surprise. There were multiple warnings beforehand. The residents of the households that are being demolished had the chance to do it themselves before the date and keep the few materials they used to build them in the first place. They also had time to remove their belongings, but some didn’t do due to the lack of means.
The event isn’t shown in the press. The media isn’t informed because it isn’t considered major news. There is nothing unusual about a demolition in a Bulgarian Roma ghetto: the authorities have followed procedure and it was planned a long time ago.
No organizations for Roma rights are present and no one tries to stop the demolition. The families have the right to ask for some kind of emergency procedure which would give them time to apply to EU court of human rights. But that isn’t a realistic option because the houses are built illegally on land that isn’t their own.
When everything is over, people start going through the rubble to gather anything of value, including building materials. Some of those people are the former residents, but others from the area also come to see what they can take advantage of.
“They [the municipality] destroyed 23 homes, leaving families with children out on the streets and not providing them with any shelter,” says Radka Sulyova, two years later. Sulyova is a 43-year-old Roma woman who lives in a shack with her children and grandchildren in Bratska Druzba, one of the ghetto’s more depressed areas, where the demolition took place. “I even witnessed a woman bringing two blankets to put on the ground so she could sleep there with her children.”
Sulyova has lived in Bratska Druzba for more than 20 years. Her shack consists of two small rooms, some plastic chairs, a double bed and walls with holes through which the air of the cold Bulgarian winter whistles. One of the only two windows in the shack has no glass and a blanket held by a brick covers the frame to keep the warmth in. A small metal stove is the only heating system the shack has. Sulyova has six children, who are also parents, and four grandchildren. She lives with most of them in the same house.
Like Sulyova’s family, multiple other households live in similar or even worse conditions in this area of the ghetto.
Bratska Druzba is an area of Fakulteta, the biggest Roma ghetto in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital. It is located on the north-west side of the city and has an estimated population of 70.000 people.
In Bulgaria, two streets and a park can make a difference, acting as a transition from a regular Communist-era neighbourhood, marked by empty streets and Soviet style buildings, into a shantytown. It’s like entering a new world, ignorant inside a bubble, until reality hits suddenly and abruptly. Skins get darker, misery gets worse and looks get deeper. A crowded, vivid neighbourhood spreads out as far as the eye can see.
Maybe eyes never wanted to see a place where streets are full of mud and brown puddles with a green chemical shimmer that shows how polluted they are. Where there’s garbage everywhere. Huge hunks of scrap and smaller trash, slowly decomposing, that show that they’ve been there for a long time. The dense air is a mix of smog and burnt plastic. You can smell the pollution.
The overcrowded streets are teeming with life. A life that would shock anyone but those who live and breathe it every single day, the ones who only know such grim reality. Kids wander around the streets, shouting, some playing with whatever they can find, others, trying to act older than they really are. Around them, stray dogs barking, cars revving and noises of people working. Large groups of adults and teenagers socialize, some with clear ideas about themselves, others that just seem to let life pass and fade away into the mist that appears to always cover this place.
Everything here is grey. Even the shacks made out of colorful materials seem grey. The place matches the Bulgarian winter perfectly. It is as if progress never arrived here. It is as if time never passed. As if society ignored that a place like this could exist.
In Fakulteta, which has existed since the 1930s, most homes are illegal and built without permits on municipal land. For Roma families, the process of legalizing their properties is complex and costly, and they usually have to go through many bureaucratic difficulties with little or no help at all from the municipality. Families consistently struggle to save enough money to start the process and, when they manage to do so, they have to face major institutional discrimination: difficulties to make an appointment at the municipal office, no help to understand the complicated paperwork, architects that should evaluate the state of the land where the shacks are built that never show up, etc. This sometimes causes waiting times to be longer than eviction notices, so the houses end up being demolished anyway. Another reason why many families don’t legalize their houses is because they can’t afford to pay the taxes, electricity and water bills once their household becomes legal.
With a deep, intelligent look in her brown eyes, Sulyova talks with confidence. According to her, there are about ten legal homes in Bratska Druzba. Every other house is illegal. Like most of her neighbours, Sulyova built her house illegally, without a building plan and without a permit to do so, on municipal park land. This means it can be demolished at any time, because there is no clear path to legalization in her case. Some other families in Fakulteta have the option to pay for the permits and legalize their households, since they are not built on such park land, but most of them can’t afford the 130/230 leva that the process costs.
Sulyova and her husband, Valin, work for the municipality as gardeners in the parks of Sofia. “Most of our expenses are on food and clothing and I can’t save any money to make repairs to the house,” she says. The house needs the gaps in the walls covered to maintain the heat and to insulate it from the damp. Sulyova also wants to paint the walls, buy an oven, a washing machine, a closet and a crib for her youngest grandchild. She is afraid of investing her few savings on repairing the house because it is at risk of being demolished. She would lose everything. “I went to seek help from the regional mayor, and he did not want to help me. No matter what I do, if I don’t legalize my home, they will demolish it and leave me, my children and grandchildren out on the streets,” she says.
Sulyova lives in an area where the puddles never dry up. Where some streets are so narrow that not even small horse carts can fit through. She lives in an area where shacks are called houses. “Any person walking through here has to overcome many obstacles to reach their home,” she says. “When it doesn’t rain it’s dry but the garbage is still there. It’s the same trash piles, just without the mud. You have to get through the garbage and through the water no matter whether it’s summer or winter. It has been like this for years,” she says.
Most of Fakulteta’s residents have to find their own ways to access water and electricity. The majority of households lack basic measures for sanitary conditions and heating systems, which means people revert to traditional ways of generating heat such as old metal stoves. This creates a risk for their health, as they burn almost anything they can find, oftentimes toxic, because proper firewood is expensive. These living conditions are also a risk for the security of the families, with fires repeatedly burning down entire houses in a matter of seconds, like one that caused the death of an infant in February 2006, or houses being flooded because of the lack of drains in the streets.
“As far as the infrastructure and things, the way I see it, the government’s kind of shut their eyes… this is kind of cut off from the rest of Bulgarian society. It’s in Sofia but way separate […] it’s kind of been shut off, they kind of ignored what goes on here,” says Jonathan Owens, an American pastor who owns a Bible Baptist Church in the neighborhood and has worked in the place for 16 years.
“We wrote to the municipality two or three times about the [water] conditions and nobody paid attention to the issue,” says Sulyova complaining about the lack of drains and the constant flooding of the area. “All we want for now is for the municipality to provide us with more water pipes,” she says. “All they gave us was two pipes and we had to dig them in ourselves.” Sulyova also complains about the whole area where she lives only having one garbage container: “Sometimes they come to pick up the garbage, sometimes not. Most of the time the garbage is left outside for five days in a row, so people have to start throwing their garbage bags on the street which creates even bigger trash piles. All we want is for them to provide us with more garbage bins, but they never do.”
According to a report by Spanish newspaper El País last September, “there are six million Roma altogether in the European Union and a number of studies show that there is not one country where they are not discriminated against.” Most Roma communities are segregated in ghettos that are often isolated from the rest of society.
In 2010, the European Commission decided to take matters into account and expressed that “the Charter of Fundamental Rights sets out the values on which the EU is based” that “need to be translated into practice in order to improve the situation of the Roma people, who form the largest ethnic minority in the EU.” In 2011, the EU called for a Framework of National Roma Integration Strategies (NRIS) up to 2020 that would work in line with the Member States. These countries also adopted National Roma Integration Strategies tailored to the size and situation of their Roma populations.
By 2019, few to no changes at all in the area of anti-discrimination had been registered. Although most of the proposed measures have funding allocated, some do not and remain only a commitment on paper. On average, according a 2019 report on Roma inclusion measures reported under the EU Framework for NRIS, 41% of Roma people felt discriminated against for simply being Roma in the past five years in the EU. This usually happened during their daily lives, as 82% felt discriminated because of their skin color or physical appearance when using healthcare services and 81% when searching for a job, which is a complete denial of the dignity any human being has as a right to develop their lives.
As well as in the rest of the EU, the measures have also not worked out in Bulgaria, the EU country with the largest Roma population in proportion to total population. The National Roma Integration Strategy of the Republic of Bulgaria covered issues regarding “four key areas of education, employment, healthcare and housing, as well as in the fight against discrimination and the use of funding.” But help never seemed to arrive and real change never came to fruition.
The statistics about discrimination of the Roma in Bulgaria are even worse than those for the EU. According to the 2019 report, in Bulgaria, only 37% of Roma people have heard about at least one institution or organization that provides help for them in terms of equality. Only 16% know of an organization that offers support or advice to victims of discrimination and only 28% are aware of a law that forbids discrimination. Only 41% of Roma people in Bulgaria trust police and only 22% trust the country’s legal system.
“Whenever people think about Roma people, they always think that they hold the lowest morality levels,” says Martin Stefanov, a 25-year-old taxi driver born and raised in Fakulteta. Stefanov moved out to the “outskirts” of the ghetto, where he lives with his wife and his three-year-old son. “I know that from outside the people who live here look like bad or dirty people. But they are good souls,” he says.
According to a 2014 fact sheet for Bulgaria and the Roma made by the European Commission, the official Bulgarian statistics say that the Roma are as much as 4.9% of the total population, whereas the Council of Europe estimates that they total a 9.94%. Bulgarian census figures are so low because Roma people deny their identity to avoid the discrimination and social stigma they are exposed to. Other factors, like census policies and methodologies relating to minority self-identification, which NGOs consider flawed, can also be of importance in this matter. Also, high illiteracy rates in Roma communities, due to said isolation from society, may be a factor in producing low census figures.
There is no social shame in Bulgarian society when it comes to portraying the Roma community in a negative way. Intellectuals, politicians and media public figures propagate negative stereotypes against the ethnic group on a daily basis. A 2012 report by the independent expert on minority issues in Bulgaria, says that “although Bulgaria’s Code of Ethics for the media limits mention of a perpetrator’s ethnic background, surveys reveal that some 50% of references to Roma in the press relate to crime or illicit activities.” In 2017, the Association of European Journalists said that “Bulgarian media show a chronic tendency to dehumanize Roma people, who are usually the first to be blamed for most public woes.”
All of these external factors pressure a community that has to deal with its own internal issues. Isolation due to low educational backgrounds, small economies or bad housing conditions, plus a government that takes little to no action to fight against this. “The government just kind of threw their hands up and said ‘you know, that’s the ghetto’,” says Owens, the American pastor. Even the inaction of the government when it comes to condemning Roma who do commit crimes is a discriminatory factor. “I think that’s the big problem with the government: they haven’t applied the laws to everybody evenly,” the pastor continues. “There’s laws that are supposed to apply here as they do down there [the rest of the city] but, because the government has turned a blind eye to it, the problems become worse and it gives the Bulgarians a reason to curse and to hate the Roma because to them it looks like they get to do what they want.”
“Crime has actually gone down in the past few years. In my opinion, currently the neighbourhood does not have a major crime problem,” says Stefanov about Fakulteta. “I’ve never had that fear. And I’ve been up here by myself […] People are friendly, we’ve never felt like we were going to be attacked or something. As a matter of fact, I’m a little bit more comfortable up here than I would be in some Bulgarian areas, so I think the fear is a misnomer,” says Owens. “I think, because the media and the news have portrayed gypsies as these people that are coming after you with a club, that they’re always having fights, that Bulgarians tend to be afraid of them. I think it’s less dangerous here than it is in some places in the United States,” the pastor observes.
Although there aren’t many crime related problems in Fakulteta, Stefanov admits that “there are a lot of bad things which happen in the neighbourhood.” Drug trafficking is present in the ghetto, and it doesn’t help with the external stigma. The image of young men driving expensive cars through a shanty town or of a big mansion right next to shacks, is something minor but not too uncommon in Fakulteta. “I don’t know how they get in. But for sure someone is selling the drugs inside the neighbourhood,” Stefanov says.
Health issues are also a major problem in Roma communities. Apart from those derived from drugs or from the unsanitary conditions of the areas they live in, Roma people in isolated communities have to face many other health issues. Half of the Roma population in Bulgaria doesn’t have access to medical insurance. There are many cases of “modern food diseases” such as diabetes or high blood pressure, due to the lack of access to healthy food as a result of low incomes. This happens especially among the poorest families, that generally also have very poorly furnished houses and lack access to kitchen appliances. Sexually Transmitted Diseases are also quite an extended issue in Roma communities.
Additionally, according to the Council of Europe and the EU, women suffer the most racial discrimination among the Roma community and are vulnerable to becoming victims of forced prostitution, trafficking, abuse and violence, as well as at risk from early pregnancies and arranged marriages.
Another big misconception about the Roma population is that they live off social benefits and, by doing so, they take advantage of taxpayers. “Bulgaria as a nation claims that all Roma people live off of government help. This is not true. This is absurd. […] I am in contact with very poor people, but they do not receive any benefits at all,” says Stefanov while showing anger. “There are exceptions with some families who have five children, for example. They receive 40 leva per child, coming out to around 200 for their children. I don’t know how you look after five children and pay the bills with 200 leva per month.”
Stefanov believes that the only way the Roma community can become part of society is by getting out of the ghetto and avoiding its problems: “ever since my family moved away, we can feel how we live a more different and normal life. We live normally, we work, we pay our bills. Maybe if everyone had the opportunity to move outside of the neighbourhood and chase their goals, it would be better.” “We see that people who are here they love it and we’re like: ‘why would you love it here? Don’t you want something better for your life?’ […] They don’t see it because they’ve never had anything to compare it with, never had something better to see the difference between it,” says Owens.
Most of the Roma people who have become an active part of Bulgarian society insist on the importance of one key factor: education. “A lot of people in the neighbourhood don’t even know what to dream of or aspire to since they don’t even have an education,” says Stefanov while he looks down with resignation.
Officially, according to the second paragraph of the Article 8 in the Bulgarian Law on Pre-school and School Education, which came into force in August 2016, kids between the ages of 7 and 16 years old are obliged to go to school, but this doesn’t happen all the time in Roma communities. According to a 2017 report by the European Commission, 47% of Roma children don’t have access to education and 68% out of the ones who do, have dropped out. Only 10% of Bulgarian Roma women have received secondary education and one in five are illiterate. There are only two schools in Fakulteta, and they have become schools that only Roma kids attend. There are no high schools or kindergartens in the ghetto and access to higher education is costly for most of the teenagers, who are often young parents.
“Some children come from families that really support them in the educational system, making them regularly attend school but in other cases the parents struggle because they themselves are people who haven’t been to school or who don’t see the importance of children finishing school,” says Diana Nedeva, a youth activities expert who works for HESED, an NGO that operates in the neighborhood. “It’s hard to tell the numbers of children who regularly go to school,” she explains.
“There aren’t really many chances in the neighborhood,” Nedeva continues. A lot of people also work inside the ghetto, in small self-owned businesses or on more traditional jobs like collecting paper or metal and re-selling it to make a few leva. “In the neighbourhood, young people have very limited numbers of examples what of what people can work as. They often see hairdressers, small bakeries, etc. […] these are good examples of people having their own small business but, at the same time, these small businesses are normally the same kind of business,” she adds.
In other cases, as Stefanov says, it’s hard for people who struggle on a daily basis to not lose their houses and to find something to eat to even think about education and other investments for the future of their children. People from Fakulteta are normally employed in low paid positions and, according to Nedeva “they really don’t have the chance to move into a working place that has better conditions — normal conditions.” Often people have to change jobs regularly, so they struggle to make a career or to progress in one particular field.
According to a 2017 State of the Art Report on Roma employment, that was published in the Open Society, in 2016, 15.6% of all registered unemployed people were of Roma background and almost two thirds of them were long-term unemployed. Twenty point five percent of the 15 to 64-year-old Roma population in Bulgaria was registered as unemployed despite the pervasive signs of economic recovery in the country after the 2009 crisis. The unemployment rate for the same age group in the non-Roma population was 6.7% in the same year, which shows that the employment gap between Roma and non-Roma has widened. According to the report, official labour market statistics can hardly capture the true dimensions of Roma unemployment but independent research on Roma employment shows even higher inequalities between Roma and non-Roma employment rates.
Most of the people from Fakulteta work in what the Council of Europe and the EU call the “informal sector” and in the “unskilled and semi-skilled sectors” (agriculture and forestry, construction, public utilities, mining and trade) and in the service sector (taxi companies, shops, in cleaning or gardening services). “Basically, a large number of people work in a limited number of jobs,” says Nedeva. “Really low paid jobs.”
The high level of illiteracy in Roma communities is a major obstacle for their employment. According to the 2017 report, low literacy prevents Roma from accessing measures for capacity building and professional qualification and narrows the opportunities for finding jobs and generating decent incomes. More than half (55%) of the 15 to 59-year-old Roma who are registered in the labour offices have not even completed lower secondary education.
“Very often times, children struggle at school from the beginning, and for them it’s hard to continue. So it makes the choice of going or not going to high school much harder […] when the whole application process is already more difficult because of when they were smaller, then they don’t really have the choice of going to high school,” she explains. Most of the Roma teenagers who continue their education after primary school attend a crafts school instead of a regular high school. The most common goal, for women, is to be a hairdresser and, for men, to work on something related to the building or manufacturing industry.
“I think it’s important that young people have examples of the variety of things that they can work at and study for; and that they can become different kinds of professionals,” Nedeva adds.
Nedeva says that it really makes a big difference if the kids have attended pre-school in order for them to succeed in their further education. “The children who come to the kindergarten (HESED provides pre-school services) have much greater chances of coping with the normal progress and development at school,” she says. The main reason for this is because they develop their Bulgarian better than kids who don’t attend pre-school. For almost every Roma person in the ghetto the mother tongue is Romani and “in order for them to be able to join the educational system and to benefit from it, they have to know Bulgarian [language] because everything at school is happening in Bulgarian.”
There aren’t many governmental programs that work specifically to ease access to education for the Roma, which is why the action of NGOs is very important. According to Nedeva, there are only three or four organizations that currently offer help in the neighborhood: “very few are actively doing something.” Although the Bulgarian government doesn’t have any organism that operates directly in the neighborhood, most of the NGOs that work there receive fundings from it for one to three years. As Nedeva explains, this is rarely enough. “The funding is for a limited period of time and sometimes NGOs struggle to continue their work and the projects they already started.”
Unlike HESED, where Nedeva works, and which is a well established NGO with more offices that operate around Sofia, other NGOs don’t have as much funding and they depend mostly on the efforts of their smaller staff. Fifteen years ago, a local family from Fakulteta decided to start an organization to provide basic needs for the children in one of the poorest areas of the ghetto. With the economic aid that a Norwegian project called Europe in Focus provides them, they were able to build a pre-school and a social center that offers food and clothing in Bratska Druzba, the area where Sulyova lives.
The organization started working in 2010, but in summer 2019 one of their pre-schools was demolished by the municipality because it was built on illegal land. In October 2019, they reopened it 200 metres up the road but because of recent water damage they have had to relocate again.
Zahari Alexandrov, the 24-year-old son of the family that started the NGO has taken over from his parents and is now the main figure of the Fakulteta branch of Europe in Focus.
Between 50 to 60 kids eat every day at the social center and Alexandrov is in charge of driving another 15 kids to school and back every day, in a bus that the Norwegians donated. “We have new kids that come to eat here every day,” he expresses as a reflection of the amount of concern there is in this area of the community. “Very few children finish school in this area.” Once again, as many others, Alexandrov insists on the importance of education. “We want kids to finish school to have a better life,” he says.
Stefanov, the taxi driver, whose mother has a bachelor’s degree in Medicine, says that, even though future generations will become more educated, there have always been a lot of Roma people who are active members of Bulgarian society. “The whole stigma where they say that the Roma people don’t have bachelor’s degrees is false. There are many people in the neighbourhood who are studying for one. There are many who are educated, who work, who know many languages,” he says, although he has even better hopes for the future generations.
Despite all the struggles most Roma kids have to face, he is very positive for the future. “This generation is growing up really well and a lot better than the generations before. I think that they are moving up. They have turned towards bettering their minds and their knowledge.”
“Fakulteta is just a neighbourhood, it’s not completely separated from the world, fortunately. And I think the access to information is easier now, so it helps that they can learn about what’s happening in the world and maybe connect themselves more than previous generations,” says Nedeva with a smile. “I think that now the young people who come to my activities are energetic, they are curious, sometimes they just need something like direction and examples in order to decide to take more actions for their future.”
