LAWLESS AND FILTHY: THE GHETTOS THAT WILL SOON BE PART OF EU

By David Rennie

Western Europe feels a long way away when you stand on the wrecked, litter-strewn streets of Sheker Mahala, one of Bulgaria's poorest Roma ghettos.

Low houses, made of poorly cemented bricks and sheets of metal, line a potholed plain of dust, scrub and rubbish.
One evening this week, men rooted listlessly through a pile of rubbish, while a skinny horse ate from a metal waste bin. The only note of cheer came from children bouncing on the broken end of a rusting water pipe.

Yet on Jan 1 next year, this ghetto is due to become part of the European Union.

Residents will be entitled to enter any other EU nation without visas, though their right to work legally seems certain to be restricted by existing EU governments, including Britain.

European money is already here, in the form of a clutch of smartly painted concrete houses. But, according to Angel Rashkov, a Roma clan chief known as the Prince of the Gipsies, looks are deceiving.

"From the outside, those houses are made to look beautiful, But do not go inside," he said. "There is hepatitis here, it is very bad."

The prince, a businessman who owns a brewery and distillery, picked a retreat across a waste ground littered with glass and excrement.

"This needs to be cleaned up, or there will be more disease," he said as he reached his gleaming Rover 75 saloon, painted British racing green. "This does not look like a European city."

The EU has admitted poor, former Communist nations before, some, such as Slovakia, with Roma populations. But in ghettos such as Sheker and Stolipinovo, on the edge of the city of Plovdiv, Roma endure poverty and exclusion unlike anything Europe has confronted before.

There are officially 400,000 Roma in Bulgaria. The true number may be double that, as the better educated often call themselves Bulgarian or Turkish.

The prince estimated average incomes in the ghetto. "An ordinary family with a mother, a father, and maybe two, three, four, five, six, seven children? An income of 200 or 300 lev would be normal." That is about £100 a month.

The Roma, semi-nomads in the past, were forced into ghettos or collective farms under the Communists in the late 1950s. Many worked as unskilled factory hands, until the planned economy collapsed, leaving them facing mass unemployment.

Outsiders, even the police, rarely penetrate larger ghettos such as Stolipinovo, leaving criminal gangs to rule, according to a Bulgarian human rights campaigner, Krassimir Kanev.

"The police don't investigate crimes in Roma communities. It's like South Africa in the old days, with the townships," said Mr Kanev, chairman of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee.

The police see their job as providing security from the Roma. The ghettos are home to extortion, human trafficking of women for prostitution, and loan-sharking. Roma gangs export begging, drug trafficking, baby-selling and other menaces, entrenching suspicion and resentment among ethnic Bulgarians.

Mr Kanev does not expect widespread Roma emigration to Britain. Many already work in Europe, typically in Greece, Italy or Spain, he said.

"They do semi-legal work, 90 per cent of it agricultural. But agriculture is more industrialised in Britain, labour more organised."

Mr Rashkov is equally convinced that his people are too poor to travel to Britain. "The Communist system didn't give us any education. The Roma will look for black jobs in countries where there is no need for qualifications.
"In countries with strict laws, it is hard to work without qualifications," he said.

The prince held a straw poll among the men crowding round him. About half said they had passports but their imminent status as EU citizens seemed to inspire little hope.

One shouted cheerfully: "We can go to Spain, France or Portugal if we have qualifications. We are people of the heat, and the weather is no good in England."

A large, middle-aged man, Zdravko Iliev, offered a more gloomy analysis. "We need help, we want to go to Europe. But we have no qualifications, so Europe will be bad for us."