Living
among rats and snakes
July 28th
2003.
Hello
and welcome to UNMIK ON AIR with……
Z.Bandic: Here I live with my son, my daughter in law and
their three children. Six of us live only off my pension, which is about 50 $.
Zineta Bandic – her family is amongst several who eke out a
precarious living in one of Mitrovica’s most run-down areas.
A degree of normalcy
may have returned since the end of the war but living conditions remain
miserable for many families.
In this part of northern Mitrovica, some 25 families live in
dilapidated shacks, often sharing their living space with
rats and snakes that wander into their dwellings at will.
A mixed group of Bosniaks, Serbs and Romas, they are former
employees of the nearby mining complex of Trepca, which once employed tens of
thousands of people. Salaries were never high, but since Trepce shut down in 2000,
many families find themselves with next to nothing. The average monthly revenue per family doesn’t exceed 30 euros.
The Bandic family has lived here since 1971. Zineta’s son
Refik says they have been struggling for years but that they have been fighting
a losing battle. Everything is in ruins, he complains – the doors and windows
can’t even be closed any more.
R. Bandic We use wood for heating. We need
15 cubic metres of wood. But it’s still cold. These houses are older than 50
years. The majority of families have been here for more then 30 years. (edit)
The houses are in total ruin. We are trying to do something but it’s
useless.
Open sewers, few toilets and no bathrooms – yet this has been home to Dragana Milojevic for the past 12 years. She is very worried about her two children, that they have nothing. I’m scared, she says.
D. Milojevic From up there, snakes
and rats come inside. The windows are too low. I can’t leave the kids alone
during the night. I have to keep an eye on them all the time because a snake or
something like that might come in through the window. And I’m scared that the
roof could fall down on them. I don’t know if we are going to stay alive.
But their complaints seem to have fallen on deaf ears so far. But it’s
hard to help these people says Sonja Blaha, UNMIK Public Affairs Officer in
Mitrovica. Not being either IDPs or people who were evicted from their houses,
they are largely excluded from aid programmes.
Blaha
They
have been asking for months and months for help, but help is not coming because
they don’t fit in any particular program. There are people who are born in
Mitrovica, there are just a few which are IDP’s, some Romas. (edit to) Ceilings
and roofs are falling off, four or five kids per room, no bathroom and no
playground, no safe playground.
The
ideal solution would be to raze the whole place to the ground and rebuild from
scratch, but that would cost an estimated 400,000 dollars. Sonia Blaha is
prepared to settle for much less.
Blaha: I have a donor who is just interested in paying a very small amount, but
very sufficient to level the backyard. It’s full of snakes, very dangerous
snakes and rats, so once it is finished we hopefully can make a playground out
of it, so that all these kids who live here in these dwellings have a chance of
a secure and safe environment and a playground.
People are so desperate
though, that many actually look forward to moving in here. Slavisa Pavlovic for example with his family
of 5.
S.Pavlovic: How can I pay 100 euros for rent when I earn only
30 and my wife has no job? We can’t survive that way. It’ s very hard.
Post-war Kosovo’s economic problems are huge with the unemployment rate
running at an estimated 57 percent. People like Slavisa have few choices –
forgotten by their own community and excluded from aid programmes, they eke out
a living any way they can.
That
brings us to an end of this edition of UNMIK ON AIR. Thanks for listening.