Macedonia is probably a best example of a country with the largest number of NGOs per capita and paradoxically with not so developed civil sector. However, among so many NGOs currently operating at the territory of Macedonia some of them have proven to be very successful in the promotion of the improvement of Roma's life by providing legal help, education, awareness campaigns, financial aid and so on. For example when I asked my friend Memet how he found out about this university (AUBG) and how he got the scholarship to study here his response was that the information and the scholarship were provided by Roma NGOs.
There are few Roma political parties but they haven't been very successful as the NGOs, mainly because the NGOs are giving direct help to Romas. There are some NGOs which have their own daily shelters for young Romas, where they have Roma schoolteachers who try to engage the street children in different activities like teaching them to read, reading them stories, showing them cartoons in roma language, than playing with them and giving them food and clothing, so these children start coming there more often because that place is more fun than begging on the streets. Apparently, this is carrot and stick game but it has proven to be successful.
I have few friends who work in the nongovernmental sector and some of them have been involved in some projects for the Roma minorities. Some of the projects included workshops and awareness campaign where Romas are given advices of how they can benefit by becoming involved in the civil society, how to set up their own NGO, how to make projects how to apply to different international organization for financial assistance and raise funds. So, this kind of workshops and seminars might have helped to the spread of the information and might have been interesting and promising to certain Romas to undertake such activity on their own. And, once one group starts the process than it is very likely that others will follow.
Still, I must say that there is a huge segmentation between the Romas themselves, which has prevented their integration in the society. Some of them are living on the fringes of the society with no interest whatsoever in any kind of activity and others becoming more aware of the benefits they can get by becoming more active and thus are becoming very active.
I believe in time all Roma will integrate in the society, even the ones that refuse to, because of the segmentation you mentioned. In fact, I think the time to act is now, because there are only one or two years before we join the European Union and the Roma population has the option to leave the country. Be careful! Is it classified?
Well, then Bulgaria's accession to EU might be ideal not just for the Bulgarians but for the Romas as well.
But (I tell this in reply to pavlovska) I meant to distinguish decisionmakers: it may well be that a bunch of European Parliament members and a number of bureaucrats working in the accession offices are fully aware of the issues involved, but the decisions will be made by higher-ups who don't read their reports and have other priorities. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
As Dodo mentioned the issue is whether this knowledge is used in decision making. In the meantime it does shine a light on the situation in Bulgaria and Romania (there is a similar report for Romania).
It might be that the recent ethnic conflict in Macedonia between the Albanians and Macedonians brought the issue of the respect of minority's rights not just to Albanians but to Roma's as well. I don't know how it is in other multiethnic societies, i.e. if there is ethnic tension between different minority and majority groups and if there is a tendency between different minority groups to stick together or not, but during the war in Macedonia it seemed that the Romas and Macedonians were more close together than Albanians and Romas. Probably that was because most of the Romas speak Macedonian and not Albanian.
This is my personal conclusion because I've read and heard of incidents between the Romas and the Albanians, and the news on some of the Roma TV stations during the war conflict more often resembled to the news of the Macedonian TV stations. Also, most of the Roma political parties tend to form coalitions with Macedonian parties than with Albanians. So this also can be a reason why it's been more easy and unproblematic to accept the Romas. In addition, the Romas have never been very vocal about their minority rights, and it was obvious that they were the most deprived group in the society, so this might have been a reason plus for people to become more engaged into improving their situation. Though as I said, the things have just started to get better, many other things regarding the Roma's situation need to be addressed.
In Macedonia there are no Romas that live by the roads in camps, and almost all of them have some kind of a house, very miserable though, and this was the first case to see wandering Romas in Macedonia. Macedonia was very criticized for not being able to find them accommodation. Fair enough, these people apparently needed support.
Yet, by then a country of 2 milion people had received over 200,000 refugees and the already fragile economy was overburdened with huge expenses for supporting the newly arrived refugees. I don't know how the whole situation with the Roma ended up, but I remember that it was a huge scandal. And, I found it really scandalous that no one criticized Kosovo or Greece, for it but only Macedonia ended up being harshly criticized.
It was also financially unsustainable.By the end of the war the only financial assistance that came from abroad were huge containers with water from USA, and all the rest was supposed to be provided by macedonia.
Still, as you said Macedonia accepted them and then it was supposed to help them, but I am not sure if they legally passed the border or not. Unlike the border between Macedonia and Bulgaria and Macedonia and Greece, the borders with Kosovo on the north and Albania on the west are very porous and not well protected. And in particularly during the war most of people fleeing from Kosovo were let pass the border, without taking in consideration if they have where to stay or not. And even during the ethnic conflict in Macedonia most of the weapon smuggled in Macedonia came from Kosovo, because the borders were not very controlled.
I also remember that there were appeals by some of those Romas for different European countries to take several families under their protection but their calls availed them nothing. So, the international community was very willing to criticise but not very willing to offer any help.
This seems to me like a very interesting approach. I had already noticed that several of the initiatives I looked at where grant funded by foundations. I went back and took a closer look at the Macedonia Romani NGO study:
and at some of the Bulgarian TVRoma funding:
It reminds me a bit (this is a gross over simplification I know) of the way regions in France gained a certain amount of "autonomy" to implement their own plans by being able to get European Union funding for initiatives and not having the French administration in Paris be the only source of project funding.
I noticed, for example, that the Soros foundation has a Roma Participation Program grant specifically designed to fund Roma initiatives and the European Commission has an internship program for young Roma university graduates from all new EU member states (excluding Cyprus and Malta), Bulgaria, Croatia, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro (including Kosovo), and Turkey.
