Outside Macedonia’s capital lies Shutka, the world’s only self-governing Roma community. This is a portrait in words of a town called Trash.
1. Shutka
Shutka, the world’s only self-governing community of Roma, began early one morning in 1963, when the earth started shaking in a corner of Yugoslavia. After the Romani quarter of Topana, in Skopje, Macedonia, collapsed, bureaucrats moved people 3km away, promising them land and homes on the site of the city’s trash dumps.
Thiirty-seven years later, Shutka – the name means “trash”– is Europe’s largest settlement of Roma, a people also known as Gypsies, nomads, and dirty thieving tinkers. In a way, with a Romani mayor, a Romani lawyer, a Romani headmaster, and total freedom to speak the Romanes language, it’s a promised land. But walk down the unpaved streets, use the outside toilets, step over the trash on the streets, and you’ll see it’s still a dump.
Discrimination and poverty still unite most of the 12 million Roma worldwide, though they’ve had a thousand years to integrate since - as most historians believe - they left northern India, either as Hindu warriors or metalworkers or musicians. Traditionally, many have been nomads, though whether by choice or because no one ever wanted them to stay is a matter of opinion. (Fifty years ago, along with Jews, the Roma were the only race of people to be targeted for extinction by the Nazis).
In Macedonia, as in most countries, Roma have been settled for centuries, though they are still a race apart - all shades from white to brown, they consistently call themselves “black.” They isolate themselves as they are isolated by others. The result: A fierce sense of identity, and abnormal levels of illiteracy and poverty.
Recently, barriers between the Roma and gadje (non-Roma) have lowered, but not very far. Edo Arseni, our guide in Shutka, is one of a handful of Rom to have attended university. He studies maxillofacial surgery, is active in politics and runs a security company on the side. And he says, “Nobody wants a Romani dentist. Who’d have a black hand in their mouth?”
2. Home
A gadje stereotype: All Roma are carefree nomads, living in the present.
A Roma reality: Most people in Shutka can’t remember the last time their families were travelers, and after living in Macedonia for five centuries or so, they’re as proud of their living rooms as anyone else.
In Shutka, on streets called New Life, Kalahari and John F. Kennedy, one-room shacks stand next to half-built mansions, built room by room with money from Shutka men in Germany or Sweden who intend to return home some day. All over town, you see women bent over, washing laundry or scrubbing pavements. “People say we are dirty,” says one man. “But you have to take your shoes off to come into my house.”
Outside the houses, though, dirt is firmly in control. There are three trash collectors for 350 acres of garbage. The mayor blames the government, the government blames the mayor. “But it’s also the way people think here,” says a Romani translator. One day, the photographer leaves his used Polaroids in the TV station’s trash can. The next day, they are strewn on the ground outside.
3. TV
The town hall of Shutka is more like a town hut. A small, low building, it contains only eight municipal staff serving 40,000 people, and only two with a university education. Nezdet Mustafa, 38, Europe’s only Romani mayor and president of Macedonia’s United Roma Party, is young, well-dressed and intense, and - a true politician - he reveals virtually nothing about anything. That could be because he has a degree in philosophy. Or because, as he says, you can’t achieve much in four years when Shutka has been neglected for 35. Or perhaps he just has no answer to “Why is Shutka such a dump? ”
But Nezdet Mustafa doesn’t need journalists’ approval to be in control in Shutka. As any modern politician knows, getting into people’s living rooms is the key to success, and Nezdet Mustafa is the owner of Shutel TV, Shutka’s Romani TV station. Avidly watched by all of Shutka and 80 percent of Skopje, Shutel screens variety shows of Romani music and American and Indian-made “Bollywood” feature films. The news is presented by two Macedonians, perhaps because only now are Roma beginning to speak Romanes “properly,” as our translator says. “I grew up in a mixed community,” says presenter Mari Veljanovska, 32. “I’m happy here - but I would never do any Romani propaganda against Macedonians.”
4. Secrets and lies
It’s said that the Roma have survived centuries without homeland or government because of a powerful code of secrecy. Keeping the gadje in the dark about their traditions and lifestyle has kept the Roma apart, but intact.
In Shutka, where traditional Romani concepts have been lost through years of assimilation, secrets and lies still have their place. Every five minutes a translator or guide will hiss, “Don’t take a picture of that!” Photographing women and homes both require the permission of the male of the household. Prepubescent girls are OK - beyond that, the father holds the copyright.
Overcoming this is sometimes less complicated than it seems, as when Miss Roma, one of Shutka’s two beauty queens, volunteers one day to be photographed. The next day, her father says no:
“It goes against tradition, no one will want to marry her if you photograph her ”
But she’s been on TV!
“It goes against tradition. But you can do it if you pay me DM1,000.”
As Shutka’s young women look no different from young Macedonian women - skintight trousers, makeup, glossy hair - it’s a shock to find their fate is still bound to traditions that Macedonians would find medieval. Only on the last day, though, will anyone actually talk about them, when Demirka Elezovik, 17, takes a pause from cutting her aunt’s hair to explain how her honor still rests on a bloody bedsheet and a little zinc sulfate. “The rules are very strict here,” she says. “On the day after the wedding night, the married couple must take the bedsheet to the son’s mother to identify the blood stain. The zinc sulfate turns the blood from red to green if it’s the real thing. If it’s not virgin blood, there is big trouble.” The bride is usually sent back to her parents, her dowry refunded and her reputation disgraced. But all in secret, of course.
5. Women
A Shutka joke: A doctor asks a woman, “Who takes care of contraception in your family?” “My husband.” “And how many kids do you have?” “Eight.”
Many girls in Shutka still get married at 15. Children have children. There are at least three families with five generations still alive. If teenagers get married, they stop going to school. Under Macedonian law, if they don’t go to school, they can’t get welfare payments. If they don’t have money, they can’t send their own children to school. And so the poverty cycle grinds on.
There’s a chance to halt it in a well-heated room in the Shutka clinic, where teachers from Esma, a local women’s organization, run the family planning class. The teacher is young, pretty and Rom. The class is full with women of all ages, though none of them are likely to take up the free condoms, coil and pills, when the most common contraceptive method here is abortion.
It’s rare to hear Shutka’s women talking. Usually, they refuse to be interviewed unless their husband consents, and usually he doesn’t. A discussion starts up about domestic violence, which is common (because “women here expect to be punched,” says the clinic’s chief doctor). One woman says, “I would never tell anyone because they would laugh at me. They would assume it was my fault.” The teacher says, “The hardest thing facing us is getting Romani women to open up.” It’s ironic that the Roma’s greatest strength - the family - is also holding them back.
6. War part I
August 1, 1944: In a single night, 4,000 Roma are gassed and cremated at Auschwitz concentration camp. The night became known as Zigeunernacht, or Gypsy Night, and was the grand finale of the Nazis’ 20-year campaign to eradicate people “unworthy of life” - Jews, mentally disabled and Roma.
June 6, 1999: In a single day, 50,000 NATO troops enter the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, making it safe for the return of 800,000 Kosovo Albanians forced out by Kosovo’s Serb leaders. Within six months, like a sinister seesaw, most of Kosovo’s 150,000 Roma had in turn been kicked out by Albanians. Albanians say the Roma collaborated with Kosovo’s Serbs in massacres and looting of Albanian property. The Roma say their dark skin makes them easy targets, and that they are paying en masse for the crimes of a few.
Either way, for Elmaz Redzepov, Kaplan Biron, and other members of Shutka’s Veterans Club, the murky bitterness of Kosovo has been nastily familiar. Fifty years ago, when Elmaz heard what the Nazis were doing to the Roma, he enlisted on the spot. Kaplan still relishes the thought of the number of Albanians (then Nazi allies) he killed. “We were fighting Albanians then,” he says, “and they have been killing us again in Kosovo.” In the market, 80-year-old Najia Begani remembers the war while she puffs on a Partner cigarette. “When Germans found Roma they killed them, but I don’t know why. I had to escape to the mountains, and now I’ve had to escape from Kosovo.”
Albanians used to be the butt of Roma jokes, in the same way the Poles are for Germans, or the Irish for British. But since Kosovo, no one finds Albanians funny any more. Hostility is intense and universal. Seventeen-year-old Ali Jemael: “Before Kosovo I didn’t mind them. Now I know they’re bad.” A mild-mannered music professor: “Albanians are hard-headed. They want to create a greater Albania with no Roma in it.” A well-educated young Roma woman: “It’s like Jews and Germans. You try to get on, but somewhere in your soul, you can’t like them.”
7. War part II
Furnishings in the barracks at Camp Shuto Orizari are minimal. But in the corner of one is an incongruous sight - a new TV and VCR. “The whole camp bought them,” say the intense men sitting around, waiting to tell their stories, “so journalists like you will believe us.”
They play a tape of burning houses - familiar images from the crisis last year, when Kosovo Albanians were fleeing their Serbian rulers. But these are Romani houses, and we are sitting in a camp of Romani refugees from Kosovo.
Maybe they’re right to expect disbelief. The massive displacement of Kosovo’s Roma caused no reaction in the press, though it was caused by the same Albanian refugees the world spent millions of dollars to return home.
“Until I came here,” said one man, “I didn’t even know I was Rom.”
He found out, like the rest of Shutka’s 5,000 refugees, when their houses were burned, or when their neighbors gave them five minutes to leave. “We are black,” says Hisen Gashnjani, a light-skinned, blue-eyed man. “They want to build a greater Albania in Kosovo, and we don’t fit.”
“I asked a NATO major why they weren’t helping us,” says Tahir Gara. “He said, ‘I’m sorry, but Roma are not in our program.’” Not that the Roma have ever been on anyone’s program. “History has always been bad to us. Auschwitz, Hitler - it’s all happening again.”
8. Goosefighting
Every Sunday at daybreak, Shutka’s football pitch turns into a goosefighting arena. Roma have been goosefighting for generations. Men swishing a gaggle of birds along a muddy street is a common sight in Shutka - like football, it’s a sport even the poor can afford.
The secret to a champion goose is sex. Two days before the “ring,” or fight, the bird is kept away from his mate. Furious, he will attack the next male goose he sees, biting and spitting for anything from two minutes to two hours. Today’s winner is NATO, named after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization because “he’s strong and beats the shit out of everything,” says his 14-year-old owner Sudakhan Imer. A few weeks ago, the champion was UNPROFOR, named after the United Protections Force in Kosovo, just over the horizon. The all-male spectators swear that no money changes hands - “It’s a sport” - and that NATO’s future is secure: Out of respect, champion geese are never eaten.
9. Marriage
Romani weddings are cause for raucous celebration: Marriage processions troop through the streets, with young women bearing cellophane-wrapped baskets of dowry gifts (jewelry, linen, trinkets), and with older women dancing and singing to the tune of a five-man brass band. The only thing missing is a legal ceremony.
One in two married couples in Shutka are “wild couples” - not officially married in the eyes of Macedonian law. After three days of wedding partying, the marriage is consummated, the sheet is checked for virgin blood and in Romani eyes, the deed is done, as binding as any official document.
Sometimes, a Romani wedding involves nothing more than a girl moving her things into her boyfriend’s house. Sixteen-year-old Gula Idris got married like this two years ago, because she and 17-year-old Severjan had had sex.”I never have fun anymore,” she says, she giggles like a sixteen year-old when her photo is taken. Her friend whispers that Severjan will probably beat her afterwards: “All husbands here are jealous. It’s tradition.”
10. Religion
Romani gods have changed according to circumstance. In the beginning, they were probably Hindu. Now, most of Shutka follows Islam, though they are Roma first and Muslims second. “We put our own flavor into religion,” says Edo. “We wear cheerful clothes, for example. We are Muslims, but happy Muslims.”
Muslim leader Ismael Ramadan, though, is not happy. The foundations for a grand town mosque have lain untouched for years, and he gestures with embarrassment towards the makeshift tin minaret and modest building that serve instead. “What can you do? We have no money. We’re going to ask the Arabs for funds, but we can’t convince them we’re actually Muslims.”
The Christian Adventist Church has no such financial worries: Funded by Shutka’s richest man, it still takes 10% of each devotee’s wage. In return, it offers the 50-strong congregation reading lessons, a warm space, and a sense of superiority. “I saw the Bible people were better,” says Elvis Demir, 16, [directional] who lives with five other family members in a one-room shack opposite the church. “They don’t steal, they don’t cause trouble. They’re not like Muslims.”
What do you pray for, Elvis?
I can’t pray for a job, we have no right to ask that when God has given us health. I ask God to look at what has happened to us, that’s all.
11. Diazepam
A Romani man nicknamed Tarzan - because he is spindly and sick - invites the gadje journalists into his 2m-square shack. He empties a plastic bag of medicines on the floor. Diazepam? we ask, pointing to a box of tranquilizers. He grins bitterly. “If you lived in Shutka, you’d be on them too.”
The chief of Shutka’s clinic is Dr. Mirko Mirkovski, a weary Macedonian. There are no Romani doctors on his staff, he says, because most Roma leave school at 14. The state has to pay 10 percent higher salaries to get Macedonians to work here, and even then, most pull strings to get another posting. Mirkovski obviously has no strings to pull, because he’s been here 14 years, and it shows.
“Roma are prone to neurosis,” he says when the subject of diazepam is brought up. “It’s their volatile temperament, the way of life, the economic situation, the low intellectual level.” A man pokes his head around the door, says something loudly then closes it. “You see? Everyone gets in my hair. It’s the mentality.” With hardly any state psychiatrists in Macedonia, anyone suffering from depression is automatically treated with B12 vitamins and diazepam. Medical textbooks might caution against its long-term use - “it encourages dependence” - but at 50 cents a box, it’s an unbeatably cheap treatment for the day-to-day disease of poverty.
12. Money
One of the richest men in Shutka is Selman Suleyman. Owner of three houses and US$50,000 worth of Turkish interior design (including this crocodile), he made his fortune from counterfeit jeans. “Everything is fake these days,” he says with no shame, fingering perfect copies of Levis and Versace in his upstairs workroom. “Roma are great workers, but we just have no capital.”
There are thousands of candidates for the title of Shutka’s poorest man, though they guard their privacy like millionaires. Men say “But you journalists have been here so many times and what have you ever done for us?” Their fury is understandable: In just one year, the number of charity organizations working in Macedonia dropped from 300 to six, as the international relief agencies dashed to Serbia and Kosovo, running after Albanian refugees. “We get donations for non-refugees maybe once every two months,” says Emin Jelal-Shile, who runs the Macedonian charity Homos. The Roma just aren’t fashionable enough victims.
13. Work
“What do you do?”
“Privat”
This is usually followed by, “You know there’s 90 percent unemployment here?” You nod, because the number of men standing on the street is hard to ignore, and because people say it so often, it becomes the Shutka motto.
When communism collapsed in the early 1990s, the Balkans practically closed down. Lots of Macedonians, and most of the people in Shutka lost their jobs. Now, jobs are scarce for everyone, and most survive doing “private” (non-state) work - selling Bulgarian socks, or donated clothes or Red Cross food rations. They remember Tito (Yugoslavia’s communist leader for 50 years) with affection. “Tito respected us,” says Mitat Bantia, 72, trying to sell some clothes in the market. “But now we’re an economic threat. We are the people who threaten the gadje’s jobs. Discrimination here is not about race, it’s about money.”
The solution is ironic: The world’s most notorious nomads, settled for hundreds of years, have to move: Germany, Italy, Sweden - anywhere there’s work, though it’s usually illegal. “You can buy visas for DM 3,000 in any embassy here,” says one frequent traveler. They have no choice, says Edo. “In some countries there is real persecution. In Macedonia, Roma don’t get raped or burned or chased from our houses. We just die of poverty.”
14. Putzka
Take a crowded ghetto in Macedonia. Make sure it’s situated on the heroin trafficking route from Afghanistan to Western Europe. Add some Albanian mafia drug pushers and hundreds of unemployed, bored and demoralized young people. Lower the price of heroin to 600 dinars (US$9) a bag. Add some questionable sexual habits, like insisting that brides must be virgins, (thereby encouraging anal sex), and don’t provide any AIDS testing. Don’t educate men to use condoms. Then come back in five years and test everybody.
Walking along the street, our translator stops a young man. “Interview him!” he shouts loudly. “He’s a putzka!” The boy nods and smiles, and in full view of the busy market nearby, agrees to a chat. He gives his name, though his family doesn’t know he’s gay and is working on finding him a wife. In a fiercely macho society, this is surprising behavior, especially when he says, “I can’t live freely as a homosexual. There are no gay bars, nowhere for us to go. My friends get beaten up.” But then some teenage boys arrive, chat swaggeringly and leave, and the putzka says, “That was my boyfriend. He’s a ‘man’ - I give him pleasure, but he doesn’t give me any pleasure. That’s how it works around here.”
“The Roma are a rigid and macho society but they make space for us,” says transvestite Ibrahim Ramadan. Probably because putzkas are useful - half of young boys lose their virginity to them, since anal sex is the standard way to get around the taboo of no sex before marriage.
As yet, nobody is ringing HIV alarm bells. “There’s no AIDS here yet,” says the putzka. “Look at my boyfriend. He dresses nicely, he can’t be dirty. I don’t go with just anyone.”
15. Language
There are several Romani heroes: the brothers Ramiz Hamed, famous partisan fighters; the first ever Romani member of Parliament, Abdi Faic. But only a people with no written history would revere a grammarian. Professor Saip Jusuf, sitting in a cozy house in Skopje, tells of his uncle, a prisoner of war in India who found he understood Hindi. And he lists the linguistic proof - the same words in Hindi and Romanes for water (pani) and nose (nek) - that has made him world-famous. Away from the limelight, Muzafer Bislim [directional] has spent fifteen years compiling a Romanes dictionary. “I realized there was no Romanes translation of the Bible. I needed a dictionary to do one, and there wasn’t one of those either.” The Roma are united by blood and language, he says, though traveling and settlement have diluted both (40 percent of each dialect is now the language of the host country). But put a Greek Rom and a German Sinti together - even two who cannot read and write, as many Roma still can’t - and they can still understand each other.
16. Stereotypes
Shaip Arseni, 58, is the Romani headmaster of Brothers Ramiz Hamed High School. “Years ago, Roma were only considered good for one thing - as entertainers. People say the Roma have music and dance in their genes. If you ask any Gypsy he will tell you this myth, because he has come to believe it himself. Gadje use this myth to explain why the Roma perform badly in school - because education is not in their genes! The reality is economic rather than genetic. Poverty keeps the Roma illiterate: They have no money to go to school and no desire to learn. A big problem is that we live in a ghetto. It makes it hard for us to integrate, but at the same time, living separately is a strength. When Yugoslavia was ruled by Tito, we really had democracy. Life was safer. Now there are the Kosovo refugees, the mafia, lots of threats. So I keep a pump action shotgun and a Maverick 12 handgun in my house. I’ve seen American films on TV and everybody has a gun.”
17. Music
There is nowhere to escape music in Shutka. In the form of “extra turbo folk hip” (traditional Romani rhythms mixed with synthesizer beats and a large dose of kitsch) it blasts from loudspeakers on cassette stalls. In the form of brass bands, it walks down the street in exuberant wedding processions, small men booming sounds from huge tubas. In the form of old mandolins, it strums in a bare classroom, rehearsal space for the school’s prizewinning orchestra. In an underground club in Skopje, it pulsates along with American rap stars in a Roma-only disco that closes at 11:30pm, when most Macedonians think the night is just beginning.
Everyone has an opinion on it. “It’s in our blood,” they say. “It’s our instinct,” says 61-year-old Kefaed Abas. “A Romani kid can play better than an adult Macedonian.” It’s genetic, says Rasim, a musician. “Other musicians play by reading or learning, but we breathe music.”
But down the road in Topana, one of Romani music’s superstars, Esma Redzepova, loudly disagrees. Wearing her trademark turban and gold jewelry, in her half-finished mansion on top of a hill, she has no time for mythical stereotypes. “My voice is 1 percent talent and 99 percent hard work,” she barks. “People say Roma have a natural gift for music, but it’s not true. Music is the luxury of the poor.”
Published in COLORS 42: Roma