Do you remember the Decade of Roma Inclusion? It started 10 years ago and ended a few days ago. The beginning was in February 2005 at a pompous ceremony, attended by the premiers of all the 12 Eastern European countries that had entered the inclusion. A decade later no one even bothered to mark the end or to report the work done, as most likely there is nothing to report.

The noble initiative had set the ambitious goal to provide to the greatest minority in Europe an equal access to education, labor markets and healthcare services, improving its living standard. The serious financial support came from the Open Society Institute and the World Bank. The EU also joined by obliging back in 2011 its member-states to develop the respective strategy. However the Roma decade failed to go over the declarations of governments and NGOs and there are no visible results. The Roma ghettoes still live in misery, with poor houses and muddy streets that cannot be found on any map. Each roof has a satellite dish, but life can be found in the street, where really dirty children play in the dust, supervised by their teenage moms and grandmothers. At least 50 percent of Bulgarian Roma people live in such ghettos and 2/3 of those would never leave the neighborhoods. The decade of Roma inclusion couldn’t change the statistics as it remained in paper only. The initiative didn’t or didn’t want to find Roma leaders, willing to turn into integration’s engine, leaving it all to the clerks. According to NGO defenders of human rights the decade failed because governments refused to take Roma people for equal partners, but it was only a part of the problem. The other part was the fact that the many Roma organizations and one-day-parties never tried to protect the interests of the ghetto community. On the other hand people, who live in a society, have not only rights, but obligations – for instance, to send their kids to school. Nothing big happened within that decade, only money was spent pointlessly and without any results.