Germany’s a Dream for Serbia’s Roma Returnees
Belgrade, Berlin and Bujanovac | 21 October 2009 | By Momir Turudic
Photo by Sophie Cottrell
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In a cafe in Bujanovac, an impoverished town in southern Serbia close to the Kosovo border, a group of young Roma chat away in German.
All were born or spent many years in Germany, after their families moved there in the nineties, and have since returned to Serbia. Some came back voluntarily, others under pressure.
Enis Demirovic, 19, remembers how shocked he felt on his return. “I cried for days,” he says. “I couldn’t accept that I’d lost everything; this was a completely different world.”
Enis looks ‘fancy’. He has blonde tufts in his hair and sports a large earring. “Everybody used to say, ‘Hey, check out this gypsy, who does he think he is?’,” he adds. “Back in Germany, nobody asked who I was, or had a problem with my looks.”
Enis attended primary school in Wuppertal, but quit education after returning to Serbia, as most returnee children have. “I couldn’t even speak the language and I was afraid of everything,” he recalls.
Sitting in the cafe with his friends, Enis seems relaxed. But there are no smiles at the construction site where he unloads bags of cement.
The site is in the Roma part of town, lined with poor, dilapidated houses. Most returnees end up in settlements and houses like these, not just those in Bujanovac.
Enis says nobody in his family has a steady job, but they refuse to beg for work. “I’m not so sad any longer, but I’m only really happy when I think of Germany. Sometimes I dream in German. I dream of going back.”
Thousands of young Roma who have returned, or been returned, to Serbia tell a similar story.
Leaving behind Germany’s good schools and comfortable apartments, and often barely remembering the language of their homeland, their lives are isolated and sometimes hopeless. For some, criminal activities are the only way out. For others, it ends in suicide.
| Agreement on returnees |
| A uniform readmission agreement between Serbia and the European Union came into force on January 1, 2008. Execution of this agreement was a precondition for Serbia’s admission to a visa-free regime with EU Schengen-zone countries. |
Although the government has strategies to assist such people, and many NGOs run short-term aid projects, there are not enough funds to support long-term rehabilitation.
Return Voluntarily – or Else!
Several hundred thousand people left Serbia in the 1990s, fleeing poverty and wars, and most ended up in EU countries.
Many applied for asylum, and even those who were rejected were not forced to return to Serbia on account of the country’s political instability and the sanctions in place against the Milosevic regime.
After the fall of Slobodan Milosevic on October 5, 2000, however, the situation changed. Over the next few years, Serbia signed readmission agreements with the majority of EU countries, assenting to receive those Serbian citizens who did not meet the criteria to extend their stay overseas.
Zoran Panjkovic, from the Ministry for Human and Minority Rights, estimates that about 25,000 returnees have been forced to come back to Serbia, while about twice as many have returned voluntarily.
The number of those yet to be returned to Serbia is unknown. In 2003, the Council of Europe estimated the figure could be between 50,000 and 100,000 but, over the last few years, figures as high as 150,000 have also been used.
New Lives in Old Slums
“Duldung” is a German word that causes discomfort amongst returnees, especially those who have yet to leave but must do so in the next few years.
“It can be translated as ‘toleration’; the state tolerating you until you leave,” explains Sanela Selimagic, a project assistant in the Returnee Counseling Center of the International Organization for Migration, IOM, in Berlin.
Someone with duldung status is not allowed to work or go to university. “To upgrade from duldung to ‘normal’ status, it is necessary to learn the language or show a will to integrate – and many opportunities for this exist,” Sanela adds.
However, many refugee families do not take advantage of these opportunities, feeling content with the welfare cheques they receive. “They expect that their status will be extended indefinitely because their children were born and go to school in Germany,” Sanela says.
“But the laws are becoming stricter. The economic crisis is affecting everybody and welfare payments are being cut down, as is their right to stay,” she continues. “In the end, they are forced to leave.”
This is the fate now awaiting Ceca, Anka and Vesna Nikolic. These three Roma girls are sitting on a bench in the Preussen Park in Berlin, listening to Serbian folk music and Madonna on their CD players.
In the July heat, the park is permeated by the scent of Asian cuisine. People play cards or eat on blankets spread out on the ground. Couples walk around, holding hands.
As the school year has ended, Anka and Ceca, who just finished fifth grade, are on vacation. But they are worried. The grandmother with whom they live has decided to take them back to Serbia.
“We will go there, we have to,” Ceca says. “But we are a bit afraid. Everything over there is so... strange.”
At 17, Vesna has already been told by her family in Serbia that they have found a boy for her to marry. She dislikes the idea because she would like to continue with her education.
All three speak with foreboding about the small house in Zrenjanin, in northern Serbia, which they will share with three other families – a far cry from the two-room welfare apartment in Berlin, where they have lived with their grandmother.
Read the article in Serbian
This article was produced as part of the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, an initiative of the Robert Bosch Stiftung and ERSTE Foundation, in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN.
