Jobs Boom in Bulgaria Leaves Roma Behind
If no investment is made soon in the marginalised Roma, Europe’s largest minority will remain in a poverty trap.
By Nikoleta Popkostadinova in Sofia, Plovdiv, Marchevo, Bucharest, Niš and Belgrade
Welcome to the Faculteta quarter of Sofia, where sewage flows down open gutters, street planning is non-existent and a mostly jobless population of about 45,000 Roma lives without aims or prospects.
You would not guess from this, or other scenes in Bulgaria’s Roma mahali, that the country is enjoying a boom that has reduced unemployment to such an extent, that it is now looking to import labour from abroad.
Exactly why the Roma, who make up as much as 10 per cent of the population, have been left so far behind is open to debate. But few doubt the roots of the problem lie in a traditional culture of racial hostility, aggravated in recent decades by an ill-thought-out Communist drive to assimilate the Roma community and end their mobile lifestyle by settling them – without resources – on urban housing estates. Add to that the chronic discrimination against Roma in schools and it is not hard to see why the community is still passed over by the labour market, left instead to scrape a living doing the jobs no one else will do, or survive on diminishing welfare handouts.
While activists have traditionally looked to Brussels to blunt the worst elements of Bulgaria’s official discrimination against the Roma, many fear that now the country has joined the EU, it is no longer under the same pressure to reform its ways as before.
The hope is that the hard logic of the market will force an improvement in conditions, by treating the Roma minority as a potential source of labour force and tax revenue. As Bulgarian economist Lachezar Bogdanov of Industry Watch, a business consultancy, says “ [if] this was a real estate project, private entrepreneurs would greedily take it since the investment would be seen as worthwhile.”
