At the last session of the Government of the Republic of Serbia last Thursday, the Strategy for the social inclusion of Roma men and women from 2022 to 2030 was adopted. It is the version of the Strategy for the period from 2016 to 2025, revised and based on international acts and national regulations.
In the press release after the Government session, it is written that the general goal of the new version of the Strategy is "improving the quality of life of members of the Roma national minority in Serbia, while respecting human and minority rights, eliminating discrimination and gypsyism as a form of racism, and achieving greater social inclusion in all segments of society."
One of the founders of the Opra Roma Serbia movement, Stevica Nikolić, says that on the website of the Ministry of Labour, Employment, Veterans and Social Affairs, he "carefully read" the Strategy, as well as the text about the results of the previous version.
"Official data and data from the civil sector are often extremely different," says Nikolić and adds that the Strategy is full of generalities and "without indicators of success, that is, without a number to be achieved." This is by no means the framework in which it should have been adopted."
He believes that the Strategy would be effective if it resulted in Action Plans that determine strategic goals, but "he is not an optimist".
Nikolić notes that the adoption of such a document "should have been preceded by social consensus", and that the Opre Roma Movement did not participate in the implementation of the Strategy in any way." But, he adds, "it is certainly good that there is a political will to improve the living conditions of the Roma minority in Serbia."
Roma are the poorest community in Serbia. Two-thirds of them cannot pay for prescribed drugs or testing for Covid-19.
Nikolić states that in 38 percent of Roma settlements, not a single residential building is connected to water more than 70 percent have no sewage system, which means that even the basic preventive measure - washing hands - is impossible. "The Roma are at a higher risk of getting infected and dying from the consequences of the virus than any other group," says Nikolić.
The state's planned effort to strengthen and improve the living conditions of Roma men and women has been ongoing since 2009, when the first Strategy was adopted. According to Nikolic, the effects so far are reduced to workshops on discrimination or educational programs of non-governmental organizations, which is discouraging, especially for more than 1000 highly educated Roma men and women, as many as there are, according to the data of the Roma Education Fund, in Serbia.
On this occasion, Nikolić states that the Fund has given scholarships to 1000 high school students out of 10.000 in Serbia.
He sees the only progress in the implementation of the Law on the Protection of National Minorities, according to which the participation of Roma in public administration was proportional to their number in the total population. "According to the last census, there were 148.000 of us, which means that two percent of Roma should be represented in the public administration. So far, we have fulfilled a little more than 0,1 percent, and that is a step towards a fairer society."
In the context of a fairer society, it should be mentioned that in the last days of December, the Regulatory Body for Electronic Media (REM) rejected as unfounded the applications of the Opra Roma movement against Happy TV and Prva TV due to discrimination: in the show "After Lunch" on Happy, it was said that the Roma have changed DNA that protects them from corona, and in the show "150 minutes" of Prva TV that the Roma community is under the influence of Islamic extremists.
The Commissioner for the Protection of Equality recognized discrimination in both reports. One of the goals of the new version of the Strategy is, as already stated, the elimination of discrimination and gypsyism as a form of racism.
S.Ć.
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