Roma pushed to the dirty outskirts of the city

Thirteen years ago, dramatic scenes took place in the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca. On a rainy Monday morning in June not a hint of that remains. The library park is situated on a hill between grey apartment blocks in the Mărăști district.

There is colourful playground which is currently deserted, the only movement a swing creaking in the wind. Blue sports equipment stands forlornly next to a newly laid cycle path. The large cross on the roof of the Orthodox Faculty towers over the site.

Nothing suggests that this place holds painful memories, but shortly before Christmas in 2010, the largest forced eviction in Cluj's recent history took place here. Previously, there were 76 Roma families living at the site of this now seemingly abandoned park, some of them for several generations.

“Two days before, they told us to pack our bags, then the bulldozers came,” Linda Greta Zsiga remembers.She lived with her family in Coastei Street, which was demolished for the library park. The houses belonged to the city’s stock of municipal social housing. The approximately 320 residents were forcibly relocated.

“The housing market has become problematic in recent years. Those living precariously, including many Roma, are often the first to be displaced”

Their new home? A few prefabricated houses outside the city limits, on the site of Romania's largest open dump, Pata Rât. “It stank terribly, there was always a pile of rubbish burning somewhere, there were no proper sanitary facilities, no electricity, nothing but rubbish,” Zsiga describes the conditions.

At first glance, the events around Pata Rât do not seem to fit in with the image of a cosmopolitan cultural city that Cluj-Napoca has built up. Every year, the music festivals “UNTOLD” and “Electric Castle” as well as the Transylvanian International Film Festival (tiff ) attract large streams of visitors to the picturesque Transylvanian old town.

But according to sociologist and housing activist George Zamfir, there is no contradiction. The housing market has become notably more problematic in recent years. Those living precariously, including many Roma, are often the first to be displaced.  

“Soon the centre of Cluj will be full of tourists but no inhabitants,” says Zamfir, explaining that the majority of the city’s population approves of forced evictions from centrally located areas, as long as they affect Roma. Prejudice against the second-largest Romanian minority, which makes up between three and ten percent of the population depending on the estimate, is still widespread.

 In a nationwide survey conducted in 2020, almost 70 per cent of respondents said they distrusted members of the Roma. “Nobody misses us in the city centre. We have to live by the rubbish because many people think we belong there,” says Maria Stoica bitterly. The 28-year-old Roma woman has spent most of her life in Pata Rât. Since becoming a mother herself, the conditions have become increasingly difficult for her to bear.

“There is rubbish, bacteria and polluted water everywhere - not even animals should live here. I don't want my children to have to grow up like me,” she stresses. She is also very worried about the health risks. “In my neighbourhood, so many people die young, many get cancer. Hardly anyone is over 65,” Stoica says.

In 2023, between 1,700 and 1,800 people live in Pata Rât, almost all of them Roma. People making a home near this landfill site is not a new phenomenon. Since the late 1970s, some Roma settled there out of economic need. They collected recyclables to earn a living. Only about 11 percent of waste is recycled nationwide; a large part ends up in open dumps.

“It was as if we had been thrown out of society”

Yet the Roma who were evicted from Coastei Street in 2010 had no connection to waste processing, says Linda Zsiga, a resident at the time. Many people worked in the city centre, their children went to school or kindergarten there. After the resettlement to Pata Rât, this was all but impossible.

“It was as if we had been thrown out of society,” says Zsiga. “In the modular houses, 12 of us lived in 16 square metres. There was a communal bathroom with cold water that we had to share with the people from the three neighbouring modules,” Zsiga recalls.

These descriptions are contradicted by Emil Boc, the then mayor of Cluj-Napoca, in a public statement: “The municipality did the right thing in 2010 and is still working to improve the situation of Roma living in Pata Rât.” According to the ex-mayor, the families had been relocated from unsuitable flats in the city centre to better accommodation with electricity, water and heating.

“Environmental racism” is what researcher Enikö Vincze calls what is happening repeatedly not just in Cluj-Napoca but all over Romania: Roma, homeless and unemployed people are pushed out of those parts of the cities that play a role in public life and tourism. If new living space is allocated to them, it is often in unattractive and even unsanitary areas, as is the case with the Pata Rât rubbish dump.

“According to existing housing laws, housing units must be at least a thousand metres away from toxic materials,” she says. Yet the modules built by the city are only 200 metres away from a disused landfill for medical waste meaning the law was broken with the forced relocation.

For this reason, Vincze, together with activists from Pata Rât and a network of civil rights activists from the action platform “Desire”, filed a lawsuit against those responsible for the eviction in 2018.