What perspective do Roma children have?

Hardly a day goes by without news of a new outbreak of violence among the Roma population in Dolenjski reaching the public; the media reports on fights, fires and shootings, all accompanied by testimonies from locals that they are beginning to fear for their own safety. But the tensions in this part of Slovenia are not from yesterday, but are merely a symptom of deeper processes that have been going on in Dolenjsko with Bela Krajina and Kočevje for decades, if not centuries. This background must be known if we want to understand what really divided the Roma and the majority population, why both the former and the latter are justifiably angry – and why, in fact, neither side is inherently responsible for the problems that plague the other.

Let’s make it clear at the beginning: any interpersonal violence is unacceptable, and even individual members of the Roma population have no right to threaten fellow citizens with weapons, endanger them on the roads, misbehave with women and steal. This kind of behavior is not the result of innate qualities, as the entrenched prejudices about the Roma claim, but it should be understood primarily as a thoughtless and inappropriate result of the frustrations of people who have almost no chance of ever rising above the social bottom. At least part of the anger felt by the rest of the locals is largely fueled by their disappointment with the system, which is also unfair to the Neros and which has economically and socially degraded this part of Dolenjska. In other words, according to the broader standard, both are second-class citizens in a strictly centralized country, and from the point of view of the political authorities, the majority of the inhabitants of the Slovenian periphery are almost completely unimportant and therefore powerless. Lost, or better said, stolen illusions are like gunpowder – and now the barrel has caught fire.

Perspective is at home in white Ljubljana. “A large part of the population of southeastern Slovenia is exposed to severe economic uncertainty. These are the people who, through no fault of their own, ended up among the losers of the rapid transition back to capitalism; many of them experienced the bankruptcy of large factories, which plunged entire municipalities into unemployment. After that, the empty space was filled by multinational companies, which hire them mainly as semi-skilled and underpaid labor.” explains the historian Vita Zalarone of the greatest Slovenian experts on Roma, otherwise a native of Dolenje from the village of Gabrovka near Zagradac. On paper, south-eastern Slovenia has made great progress in recent years, and the level of the risk of poverty is said to have decreased – but an important part of this was the rise of the standard in Novi Mesto (where Krka is headquartered) as the center of the region, while, for example, in Črnomlje and Kočevje wages are significantly below the Slovenian average, and the future is still significantly more uncertain than, for example, in white Ljubljana. At the same time, the situation is getting worse, prices are getting higher and higher, more and more pensioners are receiving insufficient pensions, precariousness is increasing, the network of public health and social care is falling apart… But the expected breakthrough is nowhere to be found.

On the other hand, the Roma in these areas have been living in severe poverty and misery since time immemorial. Already in the Middle Ages, they were not allowed to own land, which made it impossible for them to settle down, but instead made a living as itinerant blacksmiths, hawkers, traders and day laborers, condemned to the meager income they could generate in deals with local farmers, who they needed someone to fix their tools, mend a pot and sell a horse to work in the fields. “When the feudal order gave way to capitalism in the middle of the 19th century, many of the oppressed fell into severe insecurity, as they became dependent on the market for their bread; until then, the feudal lord provided them with at least a basic subsistence under pressure, but then they had to earn enough for rent and food themselves. In such difficult conditions, traveling Roma artisans began to be seen as a threat to their existence, and it was then that most of the prejudices were formed, which still form the core of racist attitudes towards Roma.” explains the historian. Thus, the Dolenj Roma began to lose their only sources of meager income and finally fell into poverty. The land had long been divided, and as a hired labor force they were unwanted by factory owners and landowners alike – and capitalism relegated them definitively to the very fringes of society. Where they are still today.

Social transfers as a link with life – not only for Roma. And so, according to Vita Zalar, now in the circumstances of increasingly severe stratification and economic insecurity, the Roma community and the majority residents of the municipalities on the south-eastern border of Slovenia have directed their accumulated disappointment at each other. “Anyone who has ever lived in uncertain economic conditions and wondered day and night whether they will be able to pay their bills, buy food, buy school supplies for their children, pay off a loan, or have already thought about where they will get a new one, whether they will keep their job or but he doesn’t even find it anew, such a person knows how difficult it is to fulfill all his social roles at the same time.” It is true that, among all the regions in the country, Southeastern Slovenia has reduced the risk of poverty the most drastically in recent years, but as experts from the Novo mesto Development Center wrote in the regional development program for the period 2021-2027, this is largely due to social transfers . Which are far from being received only by the Roma, but also by other groups of the Dolenj population, especially the poor elderly, the unemployed and refugees. In such a situation, people are especially tense, and every stolen bike, every moved landmark or even just an inappropriate gesture can be the cause of an incident.

In this context, it is possible to understand why a good part of the majority of the population from the mentioned municipalities looks at the Roma from the sidelines, saying that they are lazy and mainly take advantage of social assistance, explains the interlocutor. “Exactly these adjectives are always used to punish those who are not included in the system of capitalist production, i.e. not only the Roma, but also the homeless, the poor, the cultured, refugees, addicts… Whoever does not work, let him not be – and no one asks, does this person even have the possibility of a decently paid job.” Without the mentioned help, the families from the Roma ghettos would certainly be condemned to starvation – they did not inherit any property, and it is difficult to acquire new ones legally. Many people turn to crime to survive. Because social transfers are far from enabling the majority of Dolenje Roma to live a decent, let alone a comfortable, life. In 2020, NIJZ research found that Roma men die on average at the age of 48, almost thirty years earlier than the Slovenian average; Roma women live to be 63 years old, twenty years less than the average. The mortality rate for Roma infants up to one year of age is four times higher than for infants in Slovenia, and the mortality rate for Roma children aged one to four is as much as seven times higher than the national average.

The fish stinks in the head, and capitalism in the one percent of the chosen one. In these data, one must look for the origin of the rage, possibly also the contempt, that now problematic Roma individuals show towards the wider community. As the interlocutor summarizes: “When you’re under constant stress and you’re adding up the boxes and choosing between canned goods at the store, and you have absolutely no social power, it’s hard to be kind – to yourself, your family, your neighbors…” That in their distress, marginalized groups quickly turn against the police, in whom they see the personification of state violence against them, is shown by examples from all over the world, this was most clearly seen in the struggles between the American police and the black minority, which reached their peak in the Black movement Lives Matter. Physical violence is a response to systemic injustice and exploitation, but these incidents should not be taken as proof of the depravity and savage nature of a group of people. As well as the fear and anger that their neighbors feel when violence erupts from Roma villages, it should not be taken as proof of the inherent intolerance of the Dolenj, Kočeva and Belokranje residents, but are also an expression of real distress and justified frustrations.

Additional repression and criminalization are not the solution, conditioning social transfers with “integration” in “assimilation” – which are just fine expressions for the destruction of a certain culture – and even less, warns Vita Zalar. “Our country is based on the experience of man as the highest value. That is why every person living on its territory deserves a decent life, and the state is obliged to provide him with the rights that enable him to do so – this is what we agreed upon when we gained independence, and this is the essence of our constitution.” Instead of the little man arguing and beating and even shooting with another little man, in her opinion, she should stand together and direct her frustrations at the one who robbed them of their future and pitted one against the other: that part of the capitalist system, “where there is a large structural theft of the wealth that we all create together” – i.e. the proverbial one percent of the richest, who only benefit from the Dolenj farmers, artisans, workers, pensioners (…) and from the maintenance of the reserve army of unemployed marginals.

If we would slap the fingers of this highest layer of capitalism, if, for example, we would simply properly tax luxury and the large profits that multinationals make in Slovenia, and prevent the privatization and dismantling of public health care, we could significantly improve the living conditions of everyone, especially all economically threatened inhabitants of South-Eastern Slovenia – and you can bet that decent houses would grow in the places of mud puddles, and the level of crime and attacks on police officers would start to miraculously decrease. But of course the political authorities will not do it by themselves.