Roma fight environmental racism in Romania | Global Ideas | DW

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Next to the airport on the outskirts of Cluj-Napoca, one of Romania’s most dynamic cities, is a huge landfill. While flying, it’s easy to miss the multi-colored roofs strewn between the green grass and the mounds of garbage. But at ground level, the neighborhood is teeming with life. Horse-drawn carts pass empty garbage trucks heading back into town. Barefoot children run between makeshift wooden houses and crows hover above their heads.

This is Pata Rt, the country’s largest landfill site and has long been one of its most egregious environmental sins. For decades, pollution escaped from untreated waste and garbage fires broke out, sometimes killing the occupants of these log cabins.

Under pressure from the EU, the city began work to close the site in 2015. Some 2.5 million tonnes of waste, accumulated over 70 years and covering an area the size of 27 football pitches, have been sodded. , and at the end of 2019, the local authorities declared Pata Rt “history”.

Yet for the 1,500 Roma who still live here, Pata Rt is alive and well. And so does the environmental hazard on their doorstep. Two “temporary storage” landfills installed next to the old one in 2015 continue to grow steadily, and experts say the old waste has never been properly treated.

“It was not an ecological landfill, it was not built in accordance with European standards”, explains Nodis. “All these toxic substances have gone into the soil, into the groundwater. Everything in the area is polluted.”

“Temporary” landfills next to the original Pata Rt landfill have grown steadily over the past five years and more

Kicked out of town

Roma residents of Pata Rt started arriving in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some were driven by poverty to move to the landfill and work as waste pickers, but most came by. successive waves of evictions since Cluj-Napoca began to experience a real estate boom in the 2000s. The last one dates back to 2010, when local authorities evicted 350 residents from Coastei Street near the city center.

Linda Greta Zsiga remembers the cold December morning when she and her family were woken up by police, city officials and bulldozers on their doorstep. Just two days earlier, they and 75 other Roma families living on the streets had been notified of their eviction. Their new home was to be a complex of small modular units nestled between the existing camps of Pata Rt.

Linda Greta Zsiga says Romanian authorities treated her community like garbage

Zsiga says that the Roma community on Coastei Street was well integrated. They had been there for generations, paying rent and charges for their public houses, and their children attending local schools and kindergartens. Yet all of a sudden they were thrown onto the city’s garbage heap. “They saw us as garbage, not humans,” Zsiga says, “and they thought we deserved to live there.”

Europe’s largest ethnic minority exposed to environmental risks

In response to a poll last year, seven out of ten Romanians said they did not trust the Roma. Between 20% and 30% said that Roma have too many rights, that the state should be allowed to resort to violence against Roma, or that discrimination and hate speech against Roma should not be punished.

Such attitudes are not unique to Romania. Across Europe, racism against the continent’s largest ethnic minority results in the denial of basic civil rights, exclusion from employment and public services, and perhaps most strikingly, the marginalization of communities. Roma in areas without water, sanitation and waste management.

Often these sites are also in dangerous locations. A study published last year by the European Environment Bureau (EEB) on “Environmental racism against Roma communities in Central and Eastern Europe” found that Roma were “disproportionately exposed to degradation of the environment. environment and pollution from landfills and landfills, contaminated sites, or dirty industries.

Cramped, dirty and cut

Arriving at Pata Rt, Zsiga found his extended family, 12 people in total crammed into a 16 square meter room. The space was so tight that they had to keep most of their belongings outside. They shared a single toilet and cold water shower with residents of three other equally overcrowded rooms.

Zsiga remembers looking out the window at a sea of ​​garbage. “There were no doves, no trees,” she said. “I like nature.”

A 2012 report from the United Nations Development Program found that 22% of adults suffered from chronic illnesses or some form of disability. Researchers documented a high incidence of skin infections, asthma, bronchitis, high blood pressure, heart and stomach problems, and a report from the European Roma Rights Center found that more than two years after their deportation , reported health problems had more than doubled in the Coastei community.

The oldest camp in Pata Rt is called ‘Dallas’ after the American soap opera. Driven by poverty, the Roma started arriving here in the late 1960s to make a living from the landfill as waste pickers

The EEB study describes one of the main drivers of environmental racism against Roma as the forced eviction from “places of high economic value”. The Coastei community has not received a reason for his eviction. But Zsiga has no doubts as to why they were moved. “They wanted to ‘clean up’ Cluj from Roma,” she says. “Now very few Roma still live in the city.”

The Municipality of Cluj-Napoca told DW that they are cleaning Pata Rt and providing health and other services to the community. They also said they were trying to prevent evictions and were partners in a housing program for 30 families, although they do not fund the program.

Waste collectors shut down

There is no solid data on Pata Rt’s health since the landfill was covered, but an NGO worker in the area said respiratory illnesses remained common, including among children. And economically, the closure of the landfill has made life in Pata Rt even more difficult.

Adela Ludvig, 28, a mother of four, has lived next to the landfill for as long as she can remember. His house is built from plywood, the roof is an old advertising canvas of waste materials collected from the landfill. Today, his “villa” as Ludvig calls it, overlooks a chemical waste dump covered with blue plastic film and protected by barbed wire.

Adela Ludvig and her children outside the house she built from scavenged materials found in the landfill

Ludvig collected plastic bottles and aluminum foil, cans and cardboard. She says a local recycling company paid the equivalent of 0.12 ($ 0.14) for a kilogram of plastic, which means it could make 40 a day. “I could buy food,” she said, “or medicine, when the children needed it.”

But the new “temporary” landfills are closed. When the landfill closed, waste pickers like Ludvig found themselves out of work. “People were crying from hunger,” she says.

Ludvig and her children, of whom she has a fifth on the way, now live on the 220 family allowances she receives each month. The nearest water source is several hundred meters away and she has to go there four or five times a day to support her family. They have access to a generator but cannot afford gasoline.

Pata Rt communities fight back

A year after the landfill was declared “history”, the major of Cluj-Napoca promised that the Pata Rt camps “would disappear by 2030” without giving any indication of what would happen to the 350 families who live there. . But long before its announcement, residents had taken matters into their own hands.

In 2012, Zsiga and others from Coastei camp created an association that works with other NGOs to campaign for housing solutions for Pata Rt and to prosecute the authorities for the evictions. They are currently awaiting a decision on their case from the European Court of Human Rights.

The grassy meadows of Pata Rt may look picturesque, but environmental scientists warn the site is still contaminated with untreated waste

And thanks to an initiative supported by Norway Grants (through which the Norwegian government funds social projects in Southern and Eastern Europe), 35 families from Coastei were moved to Cluj-Napoca or neighboring villages between 2014 and 2017 .

Zsiga, her partner and children, now live in a three-room apartment in the city. But she hasn’t turned her back on Pata Rt. Her siblings and families still live there and she is working at the site to support 30 other families who will move in a second stage of the initiative. “I wish no one would stay in Pata Rt,” Zsiga said, “no one deserves to live there”.

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