Taken from the weekly Vreme
"The main impression about the residents of collective centres is that these people are completely forgotten: they do not receive any visits, they live in terrible conditions and they get one meal a day in some centres or three meals a day in other centres, and that's all.”
According to the Serbian Commissariat for Refugees and Migrations, there are 14 collective centres with 1169 people in Serbia today. All collective centres are located in the territory of Serbia, excluding Kosovo and Metohija, while in Vojvodina, all centres for emergency accommodation for refugees and displaced persons have already been closed. The Commissariat’s website also informs that their number has been rapidly decreasing as a result of the implementation of the plan on closing collective centres. In 1996, there were about 700 of these centres, while in January 2002 there were 388 centres that accommodated 26,863 people. In Serbia today, after nearly 20 years, there are still collective centres; over a thousand people have not yet received any decision on their future housing and continue living in emergency accommodation, in uncertainty.
We have discussed the situation in collective centres, the problems faced by their residents, the legal and administrative difficulties they encounter, and in particular the status of internally displaced Roma, with Danilo Curcic, Legal Analyst in the NGO Praxis, who has just returned from a field visit to these centres.
“When we compare the number of internally displaced Roma and non-Roma accommodated in collective centres, we clearly see that more non-Roma have been housed in these centres. If we take into account the fact that even before the war the Roma population was in a more disadvantaged position than the majority population in Kosovo, and that the number of Roma accommodated in collective centres does not reflect that situation, it becomes obvious that the system has failed. Furthermore, there are separate Roma and non-Roma collective centres, although such a division does not exist officially. However, Bujanovac is a specific case with its three collective centres. For example, in one kindergarten that was converted into a collective centre, there is only one Roma family while all others are non-Roma, but there is also the Collective Centre Salvatore that accommodates only Roma. In fact, the Roma and non-Roma communities do not mix to a greater extent in any place.”
About the situation in collective centres, the structure of their residents and their rights, Curcic says:
"The residents of these collective centres are both displaced persons from Kosovo and, still, refugees. We have recently been in Gadzin Han, where the collective centre is located in a school building. IDPs and refugees, about 19 elderly people, including seven or eight double refugees, meaning that they first fled from Croatia to Kosovo and then here from Kosovo, live on the ground floor. And they have been sitting and waiting for a solution for 20 years. There are few residents of working age who do some work from time to time, mainly fruit picking or similar jobs, and all of them have been waiting for something although they do not know what. I talked to a lady who had fled from Sinj to Djakovica, and then here – she has not acquired yet the Serbian citizenship, she is still a citizen of Croatia. I asked her if she knew what her solution would be once the collective centre was closed, and she said that there were plans for her to be housed in a home for the elderly. However, before that can happen she has to regulate the matter of citizenship at the social welfare centre as guardianship authority. In Bujanovac, for example, social welfare centres refuse to provide social assistance to people in collective centres because they consider that these people are provided with the required minimum - a roof over their heads and meals. The main impression about the people in collective centres is that they are completely forgotten: they do not receive any visits, they live in terrible conditions and they get one meal a day in some centres or three meals a day in other centres, and that's all.
The people who have stayed in the centres are usually those who are the least resourceful or who were unable to find any other solution because of some specific life circumstances. The unemployed who used to be employed in public administration receive an allowance in the amount of 8,500 dinars. Their life stories are very difficult and it is somehow strange that the state does not see them as priority, but considers their situation as a usual course of development and they have to wait for their turn. In Vranjska Banja, for example, women are mostly retired; they even worked in the same factory in Kosovo, and they mostly live in single households or they are household providers because they have ill family members. There are also many children, but mostly in the centres that accommodate Roma. The first impression of all these centres is that people are completely lethargic, that they are still awaiting a solution that has not appeared already for 20 years.”
Various administrative difficulties faced by the displaced are also the reason for the inability to integrate into the community and exercise the major human rights. This particularly refers to Roma:
“The big problem with Roma is the fact that even before the arrival from Kosovo, they were not registered in births registry books and are therefore legally invisible. Another problem is that some registry books remained in Kosovo; they were neither brought from Kosovo after the war nor were their microfilm copies made, which created the situation where a number of IDPs have a valid ID card, but do not possess birth certificates. They should undergo a procedure of re-registration, and a very large number of these procedures have been completed, but those that remain to be done are rather exhausting. People have to initiate a procedure by themselves, which costs them money, the more so because the relevant registry offices are located mainly in the south of Serbia. Hence, for example, if someone moved from Kosovo to Subotica, he or she should go to Nis to regulate his or her documentation status. This is a problem that no one has managed to resolve in 15 years.
There are also some illogical requirements that include field checks of permanent residence registration in cases where someone wants to de-register from Kosovo and register here. There is a rather specific regulation according to which police officers perform field checks of permanent residence registration. These checks are often unpleasant because someone comes and checks if you actually live there; enters the apartment, opens the closets, checks whether clothes are there, checks whether the person can speak Serbian. And there is a problem with Roma, since they often cannot speak Serbian well, but can speak only Romani and Albanian.”
As a separate legal issue, Curcic points out a legal provision envisaging additional taxation of displaced persons who are allocated social housing: "These are the Amendments to the Law on Property Tax that stipulate that taxes for renting social housing shall be paid separately. However, the Law on Social Housing protects certain categories of people, including internally displaced persons from Kosovo. How is it possible then to adopt the Amendments to the Law on Property Tax providing that people belonging to vulnerable groups are obliged to pay the social housing tax?”
The status and accommodation of Roma is one of the biggest issues when it comes to the integration of internally displaced persons from Kosovo. It can be viewed from different aspects: as accommodation of displaced persons from Kosovo, as the provision of living conditions for the Roma population in general, as the attitude of the state towards the most disadvantaged minority, etc.
“The problem is,” says Danilo Curcic, "that there should be special programmes, measures, affirmative actions for vulnerable people aimed at raising the level of their rights and dignity. However, we do not have any special programmes even for the Roma from informal settlements; there are no programmes for their housing and solving their problems. We had a case of internally displaced persons from Kosovo, who were issued ID cards with the address in Belgrade at Ivana Ribara bb, in Ledine, behind a residential area, and they were told they could live there. And then the Building Directorate came and demolished the settlement in order to construct buildings on that site. Eventually, all the Roma from Kosovo remained in the street and the settlement residents from Belgrade were given containers. A month later, the residents of Belvil, which is only three kilometres away, were evicted, and all the Roma from Kosovo who had lived in that settlement were given accommodation in a container settlement. This means that there are no criteria; there is absolutely no reason why some Roma got accommodation, while others did not. The explanation is that one policy was pursued by the city authorities and another by the state administration. On the other hand, there is an informal Roma settlement in Kraljevo, which has the status of a collective centre. How could it be a collective centre, and the one in Block 72 could not, why aren’t they all in the same position? In Belgrade, on the road to Obrenovac, in a forest, the Roma from Kosovo have built some structures in which they live. Various services visit them every year to ask them what housing solutions they would want to have, promise that they would be given rural households, or give them one or two cubic metres of firewood, and nothing more; they just collect the information and do not take any further action. Roma have lived completely marginalised in this forest since 1999, without any support, even without ID cards. I do not see any indication that this will be solved at some point.”
Download the entire article on internally displaced persons published in the weekly magazine Time: Integration or Return
