Romania: Margareta Matache, director of Romani Criss

Margareta Matache is executive director of Romani Criss, the Roma Centre for social intervention and studies, at Bucharest in Romania. In the Romani language ?criss? means councillor or advisor, a figure of authority who is sought for advice. But Romani Criss has done more than just provide advice to Romania?s Roma people. Since 1993 the human rights NGO, that is run by Roma people and funded internationally, has been carrying out projects across the nation?s 41 counties, fighting discrimination and actively lobbying for Roma rights.

How does one go about defining the Roma?
This is a good question and one that is not asked often enough. The Council of Europe have a framework convention for national minorities that says that everyone has the right to self-identify themselves as being part of a minority. According to this definition there are approximately 500,000 Roma in Romania. But then there is what we call hetero-identification, which is when others identify you as being part of a minority group. Often it is dress codes that cause people to be identified as Roma, although they themselves may not consider themselves as such. There is much misinformation in Romania, and abroad, about what being Roma means and this has been the cause of many tensions and conflicts ? generally people do not bother to ask people whether they consider themselves Roma before writing about them and labelling them as such.

What does Romani Criss do?
We are a human rights organisation and our work focuses mainly on Roma problems within Romania and we usually deal with cases of discrimination and violence against Roma people. On the one hand we operate at a local level implementing projects and on the other hand we actively lobby for legislative measures to be taken and to implement national policies.

How many projects are you involved with at any one time?
At the moment we are working on about 10 projects.

Can you give us some examples of the projects you carry out at a local level?
We have, for the past four years, been carrying out an education project. In Romania there are special places for Roma people in high schools and universities and this project aims to inform Roma communities of the availability of these opportunities and to help them apply to and be awarded these places by providing them with the recommendations they need to be accepted. The project also tries to tackle the low self esteem that Roma children often suffer from. As soon as the children are in high school we get them to go to summer schools where we teach them about the positive values of their culture, deleting the myth that all Roma are thieves who never make it through school. Unfortunately at schools and throughout the education system Roma children are bullied by their Romanian colleagues and by teachers, so it is important that they learn to think highly of themselves and their culture.

What does Romani Criss do to increase awareness among Romanians about the Roma?
This is a very important aspect of our work. Our education projects also encourage integration by providing places and moments where Roma and Romanian children can come together and share experiences. It is essential that these children get to know each other outside of school and it is important that Romanian children learn to have an objective attitude about the Roma.

Other than education what other areas does Romani Criss work in?
Health is another of our priorities. Very often and especially in the 90?s many doctors would refuse to treat Roma people. Romani Criss set up a system of health mediators, usually women, who work in the community in order to help Roma people have equal access to healthcare. This health mediation system has now been taken over by the Ministry of health and our role now is to train the health mediators so that they can be formally employed by the Ministry of Health.

And your lobbying campaigns?
This is the other side of our work. For the past four years, for examples, we have been campaigning to stop the segregation of Roma children in schools. Finally in 2007 the government has emitted a ministerial order that forbids segregation, so now our role has again changed and we are closely monitoring how the ministerial order has been put into practice. To do this we are working closely with Unicef to ensure that all children have the same access to education.

How is Romani Criss funded?
We try to work with different donor sources and to stay away from government funding in order to maintain our independence and be able to have a voice when we stand up against the government and their policies. Most of our donors are international, we apply for different European Commission funds and other donors include the Soros Foundation, the OAC and the Seed Trust Foundation.

What challenges to Romanian NGOs face?
Funding is a great challenge. We work with many small NGOs to help them in their capacity building. many of them find it hard to find funds and struggle to stay alive, so we have projects that help them with technical assistance and training. As many of these local NGOs are also part of our human rights network they help us collect information that we use in our lobbying campaigns to combat discrimination.

How many NGOs are there that deal specifically with Roma issues?
There are about 150 or 200 Roma NGOs but as they manage themselves they lack funds and most are not active. There are really only about 15 or 20 Roma NGOs that are active, about five of these are in Bucharest and are well known nationally, while the others are active at a local level with the support of the NGOs based in Bucharest. These are generally run by Roma people though Romanians also work in them too.

www.romanicriss.org