School's Out for Girls

Tuesday, 2 August, 2005

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Avdula Mustafa

“I didn’t spend a day in school because my parents wanted it that way,” said Habiba Kurta, a 21-year-old Roma woman who lives in Plementina, a camp for internally displaced refugees some 12 kilometres south-west of Pristina.

Kurta spends most of her day watching television, doing housework and looking forward to her marriage, which is likely to take place any day now.

Her failure to have been educated is the norm, not the exception, among Roma girls in Kosovo.

According to a study conducted in Kosovo in 2003 by Balkan Sunflowers, an international NGO focusing on educational projects, 105 of 177 girls surveyed had received no education. Just 22 had got to primary level.

The alarming state of education among Roma women is the result of a combination of factors, including tradition, financial hardship, racial discrimination and a lack of government strategies to tackle illiteracy in the Roma community.

Faik Mustafa, a father of 10, has six daughters. His opinion that educating girls is a waste of time is typical of most Roma males. “Three of my sons go to school, but I didn’t send any of my daughters,” the 50-year-old told IWPR. “They don’t need education.”

A 2001 report on Roma education in Kosovo, compiled by Alex Anderson for the charity Save the Children, says this mentality reflects the fact that Roma communities have traditionally attached little importance to literacy.

“These attributes were often seen by parents as irrelevant to Roma/Gypsy livelihood strategies – which were mainly petty trading and physical labour,” Anderson’s report comments.

Slobodanka Djordjevic, director of the primary school in Plementina, told IWPR that when Roma girls do enlist in her school, pressure soon mounts on them to drop out. As a result, few continue their studies beyond the age of 10 or 11.

“Roma girls start school but then drop out after the fourth grade and get married,” she said.

Djordjevic added that this fate befalls even the most promising Roma female pupils, “Their parents tell us they have to stop the girl’s education because of the difficult economic situation their families are in.”

Salja Kurta, a mother of nine children, confirmed that financial obstacles have prevented her from sending any of her children to school. “I didn’t have money to get them the books, clothes and shoes they needed,” she said.

However, some international charity workers say a low level of commitment among Roma parents is also an important part of the jigsaw.

“The lack of interest in the parents is blatant,” says a programme manager for Enfants du Monde, a charity that worked on an educational project in Plementina camp in 2000, quoted in the Save the Children report.

“They [the Roma parents] are illiterate, have never been to school and often do not understand why it is important for their children to go to school and that it could be a way to grant them a better future,” the report goes on.

Nazmi Restelica, head of the Education and Culture Directorate in Obiliq municipality where the Plementina camp is located, told IWPR that local institutions have not done enough to combat or reverse such attitudes.

“Everybody blames the Roma for not getting educated – but we are also to be blamed,” Restelica said, referring mainly to local education officials. “So far we haven’t come up with any educational programmes, such as adult education night schools, for Roma.”

Restelica says the local education department now plans to set up what she calls an “informal school” in Plementina from the start of the next academic year, where adults as well as children can learn basic literacy skills in the evenings.

The issue of education for the Roma is complicated by the legacy of the 1998 to 1999 war in Kosovo, which poisoned relations between the minority community and the territory’s Albanian majority. The perception among most Albanians is that the Roma took “the wrong side” in the conflict and backed the Serbs.

One 11-year-old girl at Plementina told IWPR she encountered open hostility from her classmates when she tried returning to the primary school that she used to attend before the 1999 war, in Gjakova, in western Kosovo.

“I went back for a week after the war, but I couldn’t stay because of the name-calling,” she said. “All the other children called me a ‘maxhup’ [a derogatory term for Gypsy] and I couldn’t take that. They didn’t do it before the war.”

This anti-Roma mood is not limited to the Albanian community, however. Attitudes among the Serbs are not so different, even if the discrimination is sometimes less blatant.

“I don’t want to go to school either with Albanian or Serbian children because the teacher will put me at the back of the class,” a young Roma in Plementina told IWPR, in reference to a popular perceptions that Roma are dirty.

There are, however, three Roma girls from Plementina who are attending local secondary schools. This is viewed as a great success, as no Roma girl from the camp has yet completed her secondary school education. Two are studying economics while the third is studying medicine.

This news is encouraging. But their school attendance does not excuse them from any of the household chores that Roma girls are expected, indeed obliged, to perform.

Sixteen-year-old Selvija Alija, one of the two Roma girls at Plementina studying economics, told IWPR that her day starts long before she reaches the school gates.

“I wake up at six, clean the house, do the laundry by hand, prepare the bread and then I go to school,” she said. “Classes begin at 7:25 and I study at night, too.”

For most Roma women, gaining status as a bride is all there is to aspire to.

“I am going to get married soon and I have no plans for any kind of education,” said Habiba Kurta. “But I’m really sorry that I can’t read and write.”

Avdula Mustafa is a trainee taking part in an IWPR Primary Journalism Course organised by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.