By Dragana Peric

Belgrade authorities claim they will succeed, in a third attempt, to convince citizens that the Roma are their equal fellow-citizens with the right to get out of their cartons and move into decent apartments. Once again, Belgrade citizens were protesting on daily basis against construction of social housing project for 220 Roma families who should be moved from unsanitary settlements under the Gazela Bridge. First the Kamendin inhabitants in Zemun Polje, then those living in the New Belgrade settlement Dr. Ivan Ribar and these days also the dwellers of the Belgrade suburb Ovca are trying to get what they think belongs to them as the citizens of the capital with full civil rights - neighbourhood without the Roma.

Amidst the "Antifascist Campaign", the city authorities once again succumb to the pressures of the citizens with prejudices. Arguments given by the dwellers of the three settlements are quite different but at the end of the day, they amount to the life habits of the Roma. The habits that have emerged exactly during the struggles with the worst life conditions. Estimations are that one third of the Roma in the region have been living in dilapidated houses and slums. Some 55 percent of the Roma homes have not been connected to the sewage system and nearly two thirds have neither toilets nor bathrooms in their homes.

Distance that the citizens of Serbia feel towards this people is rather upsetting especially when having in mind the following fact - there are 108,000 Roma living in Serbia. Their average age is 27 and the average life span is - 30 years. Only nine percent is fit for work and employed as manual labourers. Just 30 percent is functionally literate and only 0.3 percent have completed advanced and high school education.

Last year UNICEF survey on social exclusion of the Roma in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and especially in Kosovo, showed that even 50 percent of the Roma children have left schools for bad relationship with non-Roma children. The children had their reasons and a boy from Serbia best illustrates the Roma schoolchildren`s problem: "The teacher never approaches my desk to check my homework".

The Roma make even two thirds of the poor population and 70 percent of the total unemployed in the region. These dramatic data are easily visible on daily basis in the streets and they do not contribute to better attitude towards these fellow-citizens. Public insensibility regarding hatred towards the Roma has turned into the acceptability of intolerance towards those who need solidarity the most. During the "Roma Decade" Serbia, also this year President, has done nothing to change that attitude except twice giving up an idea of turning one of the several thousand unsanitary settlements in Serbia into an ambiance worthy of human being.

Svetozar Ciplic, Minister for Human and Minority Rights, does not agree with this and adds there is an Action Plan for the Roma`s situation improvement and also strategy that will soon be adopted.

"Measures of affirmative action in the sphere of apartments construction, education and health care specially apply to the `Decade of the Roma Inclusion`. Measures have been undertaken for unsanitary settlements to be removed and our fellow-citizens of the Roma nationality to be moved into the urban and standardized structures. As a separate activity we have been researching the possibility of cheap apartments construction in order to solve the problem of the unsanitary and unacceptable Roma settlements in Serbia for the long term", explains Ciplic adding these actions` benefit also has to be emancipation of the Serbian non-Roma citizens, i.e., changing their historic and non-civilization prejudices regarding the Roma.

He also claims the Ovca problem has been created thanks to uninformed citizens. Who is the one to inform them? Who is responsible for not understanding the need of our fellow-citizens?

Petar Antic, of the Minorities Rights Centre, states he has proposed several times positive campaigns on the Roma to be organised with the Government support but has never got any response.

"We all enjoy Roma music but we listen to it with a kind of irony. Every movie, every TV programme, every story on the Roma has been done to stir up already well-expressed prejudices. You should only look at the Roma video clips on the Internet mostly done by the Serbian citizens. They are laughing-stock and in fact, they are so sad. Beside this, even individuals of the Romani origin have problem with their own identity - they are ashamed to talk about it", says Antic adding there were cases in certain schools where they had special classes for the Roma children and even separate rest rooms for them.

Minorities Rights Centre has drawn up handbooks for schools intended for dispelling of prejudices children have regarding the Roma and making them familiar with the Romani culture. It is expected that after the Ministry decision it would become compulsory.

Every day Antic encounters cases of discrimination in the Roma placement, street violence, and even police torture. However, the biggest obstacles in the Roma inclusion make regulations and internal rules of the state bodies.

"In order to check in into the National Employment Office a citizen should have completed the elementary education. This is the requirement most Romas do not fulfil. If it wants to stop the exclusion of the Roma, the State has to deal with those problems and leave for them all doors wide open", says Antic.

Today the Romani community is also the biggest ethnic minority in the European Union. Struggle against discrimination and their inclusion are responsibility of each member state. The European Parliament and Commission also supervise this process. Therefore, recent decision of the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to have fingerprints of even the Roma children in the aim of solving the problem of immigrants has divided the EU officials. Out of some 160,000 Roma living in Italy just 70,000 are Italian citizens, estimated the NGO "Opera Nomads".

Nevertheless, the European Commission has warned governments to refrain from "extreme measures". Berlusconi`s rashness has led to calling together the first summit on the Roma the course of which the Roma communities` representatives were not satisfied with. At the least, conclusions have bound all the participants to fight against discrimination and make further steps towards faster Roma inclusion.

At the very end of the "Roma Decade", the lack of firm decisions could cost Serbia the life of its citizens who, according to the World Bank and United Nations estimations, make even seven percent of its population. Delaying the decision to finally make the start in solving the Roma problems surely is less painful than confronting voters is. However, with every delay the future of one more generation of Roma could be irretrievably destroyed.