Plight of Luli community revisited

Sitting outside a hospital in the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh, Sarvar does what he knows best. "Don't be sick. May your relatives recover soon," the eight-year-old tells hospital visitors as they enter, cupping his small dirty hands as he begs for a living. Some people, especially compassionate rural residents, might give him one Kyrgyz som (the smallest Kyrgyz banknote - worth around 2 US cents). Others give nothing. There are some 4,500 gypsies or "Luli" like Sarvar in southern Kyrgyzstan today. An ancient nomadic people who moved around Central Asia for centuries, they only acquired a more sedentary life during Soviet times. According to a report by the London-based International War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), only then did the Luli community enjoy a certain degree of prosperity. During that time a concerted effort was made to integrate the gypsy population into everyday life, employing them in factories, as well as providing compulsory education for their children. Luli children were expected to go to school - and any more than two days of unexplained absence would result in the teacher visiting the errant pupil's home. This strict education policy resulted in many gypsy children attending local universities, the report added. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent economic downturn, many companies were forced to close, however, and the Luli community once again found itself in a state of decline. "All we achieved in previous years has been ruined," Professor Khol Nazarov, himself a Luli who has studied gypsy history in Central Asia for nearly four decades, told IWPR. And while their plight has gone largely unreported, many have since returned to begging as their only means to survive. Although many Luli maintain small plots of land for subsistence farming, a legacy of the Soviet era, that fact is particularly apparent in Kyrgyzstan's second largest city, where an estimated 3,000 Luli live, much to the chagrin of local authorities. "We drive them away, even sometimes call the police, but in vain," a hospital official, shrugging his shoulders, told IRIN. "As soon as a policeman goes away, they come back again." But begging is very much a family tradition and clamping down won't come easy. Sarvar's grandfather Yusufjan once worked at a local asphalt and concrete plant, but he too finds himself begging at another hospital close by. "Everyone has his or her own life," he told IRIN bluntly. "I decided to return to what our ancestors did [begging]. I do not press like some of my relatives, I do not squeeze for money. I take money if they give it to me," he said. Such tactics, however, don't always work. While on some days he might receive a little over US $2 from begging, on others he may receive nothing - leaving him to wonder how he will provide for his family. "It's like a shop. Sometimes there are customers and sometimes there are none," he explained. According to a survey conducted by the local El-Pikir centre, over a half of the country's Luli population lives below the poverty line. The situation of children, who make up more than half of the population, is particularly dire. Indeed, half of all Luli children, much like Sarvar, simply don't go to school at all. "Why should I?" he asked innocently, revealing a problem yet to be adequately addressed by the authorities. But in a country like Kyrgyzstan, where public resources are already limited, the prognosis for the local gypsy population does not look good. "They suffer infringements on fundamental human rights - rights for education, public health services and social protection," Umar Shadiev, an official for the Osh provincial social protection department, told IRIN.