RIGHTS: ‘Roma Could Be Forced to Improve’

By Pavol Stracansky Reprint | | Print |

Pavol Stracansky

BRATISLAVA, Jun 15 2004 (IPS) - Roma leaders in Slovakia have backed a controversial suggestion by a European Commission ambassador that Roma children be educated in boarding schools.

Roma leaders have said that the proposal by Eric van der Linden, European Commission (EC) ambassador to Slovakia on Dutch television last month is arguably the best way to educate Roma children they say are failed by the current education system.

“What Mr van der Linden expressed was one idea for solving the problems with Roma education,” Ladislav Fizik, head of the Roma movement, the Roma Parliament, told IPS. “His opinion is one that we agree with in principle and one that in fact we have spoken about previously.”

There is a need to try and persuade families of the benefits of allowing children to be educated in these types of schools, Fizik said.

The EC, the executive arm of the European Union, barred van der Linden from speaking publicly about the Roma issue after he made his suggestion.

He was quoted as saying in his interview: “It may sound simplistic, but we may have to, I’ll say this in quotation marks, ‘force’ the Roma children to stay in boarding schools from Monday morning to Friday afternoon and be continuously subjected to the system of values that is dominant in our society.”

The comments were condemned by the Brussels-based Roma rights group, the European Roma Information Office (ERIO) which demanded immediate dismissal of van der Linden.

The EC said in a statement later that the ambassador’s comments had been an “unfortunate choice of words.”

But speaking before he was banned from talking about the Roma, van der Linden told the Slovak state news agency TASR that he had not intended to suggest Roma children should be forcibly separated from their parents.

“In a democracy it is not possible to force children to leave their parents,” he said. “However, it is possible to try and convince them that it is in the interest of their children to have them attend boarding schools.”

He said Roma parents would be “pleased if they knew that their children were going to get a better chance of an education and a job and, as a result, potentially improve the living standard of the whole family.”

Roma, Europe’s largest ethnic minority, form an estimated 10 per cent of Slovakia’s five million inhabitants. But the majority of them live in poverty in slum settlements largely in the eastern half of the country where unemployment rates often run at 90 per cent and higher.

Many Roma claim they are the victims of systematic racial persecution. Children are sometimes educated in segregated classes and there have been suggestions that some Roma children have been put in schools for mentally impaired children simply because of their ethnicity.

A number of Roma children and even teenagers in settlements have problems reading, writing and speaking Slovak.

Roma leaders, government representatives and sociologists are agreed that improving education among the Roma is key to helping them out of poverty and into work.

Alexander Patkolo, leader of the Slovak Roma Initiative, a Roma political grouping, told a press conference that current levels of Roma education were poor.

“The current condition and level of Roma education in Slovakia is insufficient and will soon be unbearable,” he said. “The current education system has failed because many Roma pupils leave schools only semiliterate.”

The government plenipotentiary for the Roma, Klara Orgovanova, said the government would not adopt plans to encourage Roma children to attend boarding schools.

“Roma children are often not even able to leave for a few weeks to summer camp – they have close emotional ties to their parents and their parents to them,” she told local media.

But the Education Ministry has drawn up plans for more integrated learning between Roma and non-Roma children at schools.

In a white paper the ministry has proposed better preparation of teachers, assistants, and other education workers who work with Roma children, and plans for providing Roma children’s parents more information about the performance of their children at school.