Vidra, Romania (AP) – In the garbage-strewn slums of Sintesti, less than 10 miles from Romania’s capital, Mihai Bratu scrapes a dangerous existence for his Roma family amid the foul stench of burning plastic that covers the sky day and night.
Like many in this community, illegally setting fire to anything he can find that contains metal – from computers to tires to electrical cables – seems his only way to survive.
“We sell it to people who buy metal, we are poor people … we have to work hard for a week or two to get a kilo of metal,” said 34-year-old Bratu, sitting on an old wooden cart. The Associated Press. “We struggle to feed our children … The rich people have the villas, look at the palaces of the rich people.”
You don’t have to look far.
The main road running through Sintesti, a largely Roma village in the municipality of Vidra, is dotted with ornate, semi-built villas and dotted with shiny SUVs. Behind it, the parts where Bravu and his young children live, hide a social black hole without sanitation or running water. The two worlds are strongly linked.
For Octavian Berceanu, the new head of the Romanian National Environmental Protection, the government’s environmental protection agency, the pollution from the illegal fires that burn here almost incessantly was so bad that he started regular raids on the community – where he says, “mafia structures” about ‘modern slaves’.
“This is a kind of slavery, because the people who live here have no chance to go to school, to get a job in the city, which is very close, they have no infrastructure such as an official electricity grid, water, roads. – and that is destroying their view of life, ”Berceanu told The Associated Press on a police-led tour in April.
Sintesti’s slums, like Roma communities elsewhere, have long been ignored by the authorities. They consist of makeshift houses, where unofficially rigged electrical cables encircle the ground and run across a sea of trash.
“For too many years they were allowed to somehow do this filthy work,” said Berceanu. “Nobody has come here in the past … to see what’s going on.”
One day in April, authorities on a patrol in the area seized a van loaded with 5,000 kilograms of illegal copper, worth a whopping 40,000 euros ($ 48,000). That’s just a tiny cog in the local illegal metal recycling industry, highlighting the staggering income it can bring to the wealthy homeowners.
But in addition to significant social concerns, the fires could significantly increase pollution in Bucharest, possibly by as much as 20-30%, according to the environmental manager, sometimes pushing air quality to dangerous levels.
“The smoke particles are carried by the wind for 16 kilometers, it is like rain over Bucharest and it destroys the air quality in the capital. It’s a hundred times more dangerous than wood fire particles – there are many poisonous components, ”said Berceanu.
On a patrol in Sintesti in the late afternoon, AP journalists joined Berceanu and four police officers as they took up residence in a sharp cloud of smoke rising above the stew homes. A raucous scene erupted until a huddled elderly lady could be persuaded to extinguish the fire with water – exposing the precious metal remains.
“Of course, if local authorities don’t enforce the law, people – regardless of ethnicity – are encouraged to keep doing what they do,” said Gelu Duminica, a sociologist and executive director of the Impreuna Agency, a Roma-focused nongovernmentalist. organization.
Focusing on pollution from the Roma community, says Duminica, rather than on major industry or the more than 1 million cars in the densely populated 2 million capital, it is ‘scapegoating’ and part of a political ‘branding campaign’ .
“All over the world, the poorest exploit marginal resources to survive. We have a chain of causes: low education, low infrastructure, low development … many things are low, ”said Duminica
“The rich Roma control the poor Roma, but the rich Roma are controlled by others. If you look at who is in charge and who controls things, chances are you will be faced with major surprises. Let’s not treat it as an ethnic issue, ”he said.
In the future, the environmental chief hopes that surveillance drones with pollution sensors and infrared cameras can help paint a clearer picture of how the networks work.
“We are working against organized crime and it is very difficult,” he said. “If we solve this problem here, near Bucharest, we can solve any kind of problem like this all over the country.”
For local resident Floria, who declined to give a last name but said she was in her 40s, a lack of official documents, education, and options leaves her and her community without alternatives.
“We don’t want to do this. Why don’t they give us jobs like (communist dictator Nicolae) Ceausescu used to do: they came in buses and cars and took us into town to work, ”she told The Associated Press. “Gypsies are seen as the worst people wherever we go or what we do.”
Mihai Bratu blames the local authorities for the plight of his community, the lack of roads, the lack of action.
“The mayor is not helping us!” he exclaims, as a little boy shifts building materials from Bratu’s horse cart to the muddy yard next door.
“What do we have? What can we have? A little house? – whatever God has given us.”