Steffen Seibert's Travel Diary: On the road in Kosovo with UNICEF - Day 4
Thursday, September 27, 2007 – Mitrovica We are in the North again today, on the road towards Mitrovica. We are headed for the Southern part of the city where almost only ethnic Albanians live and there the Roma Mahalla used to be located. Prior to the NATO bombings of Serbia, more than 8,000 Roma people lived on this side of the river Ibar. They all were forced out by the Albanians in 1999 and their homes were destroyed. Today, only two or three ruins are all that remains of this ancient part of town. Now, eight years later, the Roma are set to reclaim their lands. International organizations finance the rebuilding of the Mahalla. The first 50 familes have returned into new, better houses. We seem to be lightyears away from the misery that we saw on the other side of the river. All the Roma we talk to are quite happy with how the rebuilding progresses. But hardly any of them have work or can make their own living. And, when no Albanians are around, they tell us that they, the Roma, still feel unsafe and unwanted here. They say that they are being called bad names in the streets and that they are sometimes even beaten up. Sadete agrees. She is 16 years old. In the war, she fled the Roma Mahalla to Macedonia and returned later. She was happy enough to go through the UNICEF-supported school education in the refugee camps in the Northern part of Mitrovica to make up for the lost years of the war. After that, she participated in a one-year after-school programme to get some start-up teaching to open her own kiosk. Now she has become a novelty among the Roma: A 16-year old girl that work to make the living for her family and who is not married.
And Sadete does not plan on marriage either in the near future. “If I had married as early as some of my friends, I could only sit around at home. All this would not have been possible.“ Sadete continues to try and convince her friends that early marriage only creates problems, but she is not successful very often. Many girls leave school at the age of 13 and get married straight away. “If these were my daughters“, says Sadete, “I would advise them differently.“ With her little store, Sadete is one of the bearers of hope in the Roma Mahallah. But she and her family also live behind heavy metal doors and are guarded by three dogs. When Sedate wants to go out without being harrassed, then she does that in the Serbian North of Mitrovica. When I now travel back to Germany, of course many open questions still remain. Actually, the Kosovo dilemma seems even more confusing to me now than it did before. And no matter what the immediate future of Kosovo looks like, I think the Roma will remain in danger for a while no matter what. I think Kosovo is not a place where you should forcibly repatriate people to and hope that the German government continues not to do so. I the meantime, UNICEF simply has to keep supporting the Roma. The aid programmes that we saw here and the cooperation with other partner organizations is showing first successes. More children go to school. More Roma women get involved and with this, the high child (and mother) mortality rate should be lowered. And I also hope that it can also be achieved that more and more people her realize that the Roma have a right to be here and live here like any other ethnic group.
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