5th to 11th december 2007
Belgrade and Kraljevo

Wednesday, 5th december
Anders and Henrik

I met with Anders and Henrik, a swedish photographer and a swedish journalist, in Belgrade on Wednesday evening. They wanted to know about the plans for the coming days. They were also curious about the general situation in Serbia, about young people's position on Kosovo, on the prospects of joining the European Union, on Roma and IDPs.


Photographer Anders Hansson and kids at Gazella camp in Belgrade

Thursday, 6th december
Visit to Gazella settlement

We visit Mico and Biljana in their home in the Gazella settlement. They are sad because Biljana's 15-year-old daughter Gordana got married some three weeks ago and went to a Roma camp near Leskovac to live with her new husband. She threatened if her parents didn't give her permission to marry, that she would run away to Leskovac. Mico thought it would have been a major disgrace, so he invited the young man's family to come to Gazelle for her. Biljana told us that the girl calls her from time to time, but she is angry and she hangs up the phone on her. She was against Gordana getting married at 15 because she is still too young for the obligations of married life.
The two eldest children started attending the evening school which is not far from the settlement and Biljana and Mico also hope for one of the girls to start elementary school when the settlement relocates.

It was time for Mico to go to work - collecting scrap paper and metal - and we decided to accompany him. He collects recyclables in a radius of 15 km on a bicycle adapted for the purpose. He shows us a prefabricated house that he hopes to get somewhere on the outskirts of Belgrade in the spring. It is also promised to the Roma that one member of each family will get permanent employment in the Sanitation or Parks Maintenance Utilities. What Biljana looks forward to the most is to have a bathroom because she is four months pregnant and she believes it will be much easier for her to raise her child in normal conditions, instead of the conditions they have now.
We spend our day in the camp talking to its residents about the life in the settlement, about their hopes for the future. They are very bitter about their current situation and they all hope to move and get prefabricated houses to live.
We also meet an orchestra from Gadžin Han, a small town near Niš, who stay in the Gazelle settlement whenever they have a gig in Belgrade. They proudly tell us that they have been playing on the Serbian national television, on Pink Television which is one of the top-rated TV stations in Serbia, but the problem is that none of these media houses pay them much, so when they don't have any bookings they collect recyclables together with their hosts.


Part of Gazella

We visit the family of Verat, nicknamed "Prince", the representative of 32 Roma families from Kosovo. He wants money for the interview first and then he lets us into his home.
Prince shows us a photograph of his house in Pristina where he worked as a butcher. His family had a house in Pristina, and he also built an additional house for his own family on this land. But it has all been destroyed and he is afraid to go back. He would only return to Kosovo if the Serbian police and armed forces went back. He says Kosovo is not safe at all for the Roma.
He also hopes for the camp to move and that his family will get an apartment or a prefabricated house. He says the conditions in the settlement are very bad. They have to steal electricity from lampposts, their only water supply is a single fountain across the road from the settlement.

Most of the displaced Roma from Kosovo living under Gazelle come from the Roma Mahala in the southern section of Mitrovica. They barely mention the possibility of returning to Kosovo, because they are aware that the safety situation is very bad in the Province and that there is very few Roma left in Kosovo.

Outside each home we see an improvised stove made of a metal TV set box with fire lit beneath it where the Roma are cooking food or coffee. Everyone asks us for aid in food or money.
The children follow us around, asking us to photograph them and give them money. Some of them go to school and know some English phrases and they are very happy that Anders understands when they ask him what his name is or how he is doing.


Kids at Gazella

In the afternoon we come back to the settlement again to wait for Mico to return from work. He comes back happy and tells me to wait for him every day because today he has collected nearly 100 kg of paper, which happens very rarely. He usually manages to collect a couple of kilograms.
He plans to get some rest and then later, at around 8 in the evening, go back to check the garbage containers because the shops close at around that time and there is a chance of collecting some more cardboard and paper.

The next day I go back to the camp with Anders. We find Biljana crying. She says that her daughter called her on the phone the previous evening and cried because both her husband and his entire family beat her. She wants to go to Leskovac and bring her daughter back home, but she doesn't have money for the bus and she would have to take her youngest son Milorad of three years with her because he has never parted from her. She needs money to go to Leskovac and then for her and Gordana to come back to Belgrade. Anders decides to give her the money she needs. We agree that he accompanies to the bus station the next day and when she brings Gordana back, to visit them again in the camp.
Mico is rather indifferent about the whole situation. He says he warned his stepdaughter not to get married because he knew what would happen. It is all her fault because she didn't want to listen to him.
Biljana asks Anders again if he is sure he wants to give her the money for the bus tickets. He reassures her that she can count on the money tomorrow.
Mico is angry about the distribution of Christmas gifts for the children in the camp. He tells us that all 600 children from the settlement have gathered under the bridge hoping to get a Christmas gift. Anders and Henrik and I actually saw the children when we came to the settlement about an hour before. Namely, Dragoljub Ackovic (member of the Roma National Council) and Srdjan Šajn (representative of the Roma Party in the Serbian Parliament) brought the gifts but not nearly enough for all the children. When they realized it, they started throwing the gifts into the crowd which caused the children to start fighting and punching each other.
Mico is happy that his children were not there. He left the gathering early because he didn't want any part in it and he didn't want other people in the camp to se him as one of the organizers of such a disgrace.


One of the daughters of Biljana and Mico with the family cat

His house is right next to the street, and he tells us about the time when some important foreign official was to pass through this street on his way to the Sava Center. Then the Sanitation Utility workers only cleaned the garbage from the street. When he asked them to clean up the garbage on the other side of his house, inside the settlement, they refused saying that the only important thing was to clean the garbage which was visible from the street.

We spend the rest of the day in the part of the camp where Roma from Kosovo live. When they first see us they immediately assume that we are with Ackovic and Šajn's party at whom they are very angry because some of the children are injured, but when explain we have nothing to do with it, they become less hostile. They all have one thing in common - they are desperate over their living conditions, every family has at least one child with lung and respiratory problems because they live in damp conditions. They tell us about rats reaching up to 5 kg who come into the all the time and bite the children. The camp with piles of garbage all around is an ideal habitat for rats.


A girl living at Gazella

We also visit the family deported from Italy whom I visited once before. The parents aren't home, so we talk to their 14-year-old daughter. She goes to special school. She says that when they returned from Italy she couldn't enroll in regular school right away and that she enrolled in special school instead. She tells us that she is in love with a boy who is married and they see each other secretly. The problem is that a girl must be a virgin in order to get married. If she is not, then it is a major disgrace for her family if the husband sends her back. But she says sometimes it happens that the husband likes the bride so much that she accepts her even if she is not a virgin.

The biggest problem for all the Roma in the settlement is shoes for the children and warm winter clothes.

The next morning, Anders and Henrik went to the camp, picked up Biljana, gave her the money for the bus tickets and accompanied her to the bus station together with Mi?o.

Monday, 10th december
Visit to Vila Maricic
We go to Vila Maricic, collective center for internally displaced Serbs from Kosovo. The situation is extremely bad.
We talk with Simka. Her husband Janicije was throwing up blood all night and now he is in hospital in Kraljevo. She shows us her new mini stove and a small table her neighbor from Pec has made for her when he saw that she and Janicije only had a small plastic table in their room. She shows us a TV set with very bad picture. It only has one channel and no tone. Some local resident gave her the TV set instead of throwing it in the garbage.
She is sad that she has to live here. She would like to go back to their village in Kosovo, but that part of the Province is not planned for IDPs' return yet.
She shows us hers and Janicije's medical reports on various health problems they suffer from, but it is of no use for them to go to a doctor because they can't buy any medicines. It is the hardest for her when she runs out of sleeping pills because she can't sleep with the images coming to her of their home in Kosovo and of her 17-year-old son who is buried there.


Simka

Then we visit her daughter-in-law Dobrila. She lives in the next room. Nothing has changed since the last time I visited them. Her two elder children are at school and 10-month-old Tamara is asleep. The baby doesn't mind us talking because she is used to sleeping when there is noise around.
The single room is the family's entire living space and they use it as a kitchen, living room, dining room, nursery, as a study for the two elder children, as a bedroom.
Her husband hasn't found permanent employment yet. He is still working on constructions, but when the season is over, there is no work and they have to live on what they have managed to save during the construction season, which is hardly sufficient for a family of five.

The rest of the beneficiaries of the camp are similar to Simka's and Dobrila's. Many of them have children or husbands who were killed in Kosovo.

An old lady tells us about her 32-year-old son who died in a collective center in Belgrade. Her other son worked on constructions and last year he fell off a building and died.

A mother invites us in one of the rooms where her 18-year-old son is lying in bed with a broken leg. He fell off a building where he was working. He has been operated and now has 10 metal screws in his leg. The mother says that painkillers are not on the so-called "positive list" of medications which are free for the socially vulnerable categories including IDPs, and they can't afford to buy them so the boy has to put up with the pain. He says it would be easier for him if they had a TV set.

The men in the center don't want to be photographed or talk to us because they are ashamed of the conditions they live in.

Vila Maricic was renovated recently, but people still have to collect water from the sinks in buckets and then throw it outside. The smell of the waste water from the buckets is present in every room. The toilets are in a horrible condition. The only visible result of the recent renovation is new electric installations.

The residents of the camp have heard a rumor that the University of Kosovska Mitrovica will move to Mataruška Banja, that Vila Maricic will be adapted and turned into a student dormitory and the people from the camp will get houses in the surrounding area to live. They also hope for the program of purchase of abandoned village households to be implemented in Mataruška Banja and that they will enter the program and get a better life. However, some of them just shake their heads to this in disbelief.

After Vila Maricic we go to the roma tentcamp in Novi Pazar. See seperate report.


Tuesday, 11th december 2007.
Gazelle Settlement - Visit to Mico and Biljana


Part of Gazella

We visit Mico and Biljana under Gazelle again.
Biljana's daughter is back. Biljana tells us about her trip to Leskovac. She was afraid something might happen to her youngest child Milorad and herself if she went straight to the Roma settlement to get her daughter, so she went to the local police station first. She told the police about the situation - that her underage daughter got married and that both her husband and his family beat her. A police officer and a social worker went to the Roma camp and brought Gordana to the police station where Biljana and Milorad were waiting for them. The social worker then told the police inspectors that one night Gordana had been brought to hospital where she received infusion to recover from exhaustion. She probably didn't eat and drink enough water, and she also suffered from stress. The inspector told Gordana that from then on she shouldn't listen to anyone else but her parents, because no one loved her more than they do and no one wishes her well as much as they do.
Gordana has changed a lot. She has become very quiet, she doesn't want to talk about her husband and she can't understand how they could treat her like that. She says that she was trying to show them how hard-working she was, but whatever she did, someone hit her for it. She says that she doesn't need a boyfriend and she will never marry.
Biljana plans to take her to a gynecologist as soon as possible to check if she is pregnant, and if she is, to abort the pregnancy because Gordana is still very young and Biljana and Mico would like her to go to the evening school and learn some trade.