Madrid / Spain (RNN Correspondent) 27.02.1998

The inhabitants of Madrid s suburbs can find the Third World just around the corner: just down the road there are the slums of the ‘‘gitanos’’, the Roma, and the poor immigrants from Portugal or Marocco. According to a survey by the city council in 1996, a bout 5000 people, predominantly

Spanish gitanos, live in huts made of sheet metal, cardboard and wooden boards. Left-wingers and right-wingers have been arguing for twenty years about how to help the people living here get better housing. A report commissioned by the Council of Europe on one of Madrid s slums has now re-opened the debate. ‘‘Presencia Gitana’’, the Spanish Roma lobby, complained to the Council about the inhuman, degrading conditions in the misery-ridden quarters. Dominique Rosenberg, a French law professor, was appointed to inspect the slum: he counted 56 families whose huts leaked during rain and whose children were threatened not only by disease but also by rats. In his report to the Council, he accused the city fathers of ignorance of these conditions, which he said were ‘‘incomprehensible in a modern developed country like Spain’’.

Deputy mayor Jose Ignacio Echeverria had told him of continuous efforts to deal with the slums and also assured him that in 1996, council housing had been offerred, but this relocation scheme had been turned down, he said.

This often happened to the city fathers because poor people were scared of the unmanageable costs; furthermore, they wished to remain within their family unit. Several of the slums at the city s edge are hotbeds of drug-dealing. Addicts from the capital s middle classes go there to buy. There are continuous raids by the police. Inhabitants of nearby suburbs protest continually about the danger posed for their children. Resentment grows further when slums are broken up and the their inhabitants are to be reh oused elsewhere. Most city-dwellers don t want Roma - as they call themselves with pride in Spain - for neighbours. In 1994, king Juan Carlos visited some of Madrid s slums and made a point of having coffee with Roma patriarch Isidoro in his shack, not fo rgetting to offer his help towards solving the housing problem. Manuel Ramirez, president of Presencia Gitana, can now use the Council of Europe s report against the conservative mayor, Alvarez del Manzano. The former complained that, despite promises by c ity hall in April 1997 to rehouse families from the rubbish tips, nothing has yet been done. Building of council housing intended for some has not even been finished. But new slums are growing again next to high-rises on the city s edges. The metropolis attracts people who collect scrap metal and cardboard, or who want to deal drugs. And local politicians let the number of shacks grow despite all the protesting by citizens. People are simply used to subsequent debates in city hall about how to break up the slums.