Fifty percent of Dalit children drop out of primary school.

In the village of Dumbraveni, Romania, two schools stand side by side. One is for the general population, the other serves children with “special needs.” Ninety-seven percent of the students at the second school are Roma, a marginalized minority commonly known as Gypsies. “Roma children are placed in classes for children with mental disabilities although there is nothing wrong with them,” says Magda Matache, Executive Director of Romani CRISS, a leading Roma rights organization in Romania. “Segregated schools continue to exist and the quality of education that Roma students receive is very, very low.”

About 23 percent of Roma adults in Romania are illiterate.

Around the world, children from ethnic, racial and linguistic minorities are being left behind in the quest for universal education. The United Nations Millennium Development Goals, a set of targets for international development agreed to at the turn of the millennium, call for universal primary education by 2015. In the past decade, some progress has been made towards that goal — today, nearly 90 percent of children are enrolled in primary school, compared to 85 percent in 2000. But 75 million children are still out of school; of those, the majority are minorities. The U.N. doesn’t track progress based on racial or ethnic criteria, but a new report from Minority Rights Group International estimates that between 50 and 70 percent of out of school children are from minority and indigenous populations.

“You see the same thing happening whether it’s with Afro-Brazilians, indigenous people in Australia, among the Batwa in Central Africa, the Dalits in India…” says Maurice Bryan, who contributed the chapter on Latin America to the Minority Rights Group International report.

But without reaching minorities and indigenous people, the goal of universal primary education cannot be met. “It’s impossible,” says Bryan, pointing out the obvious. “Let’s say 30 percent of a population belongs to a minority, if you don’t reach that minority, you’ll never get past 70 percent.”

Take Brazil for example. About half of the population is of African descent. But Afro-Brazilians lag far behind Brazilians of European descent, averaging just 6.4 years of schooling. “So if you talk about the Millennium Goals,” Bryan says, “if you just reached the Afro Brazilians, you’d reach the goals.”

Or Romania. Most reports on the Millennium Development Goals don’t even bother to track progress in highly developed countries such as those in the European Union, which Romania joined in 2007. But Snjezana Bokulic, the Minority Rights Group International program officer for Europe, says that conditions for the Roma minority are “comparable to sub-Saharan Africa,” so, while European countries are likely to surpass most of the goals, “a segment of the population will be left out.” As for the goal of universal primary education, only 31 percent of Roma in Romania complete primary school, and Roma comprise between 2 and 10 percent of the population (depending on who’s counting), so the goal is unlikely to be met. “It’s an issue of mathematics,” says Bokulic.

The Millennium Development Goals include a specific provision calling for an end to gender disparity at all levels of education, but there is no similar targeting of disparity based on racial or ethnic difference. Bokulic calls this a “glaring omission.”

Bryan says that no one realized it at the time, but looking back, he agrees that this issue should have been included. “People didn’t used to think that you should pay special attention to women,” he says, “but once they realized that it was necessary, there has been progress on the gender gap. Now the racial gap is the new kid on the block.”

But Bokulic isn’t optimistic about the chances of achieving educational parity for minorities, even if there were a Millennium Development Goal targeting the issue. “Discrimination is entrenched and racism is very difficult to tackle,” she says. “Words are not enough.”

Manjula Pradeep of the Navsarjan Trust Foundation in India agrees. “It’s more on paper,” she says, “but in terms of implementation, the goals aren’t so effective.”

Pradeep says that in order to keep up the appearance of providing primary education, some children are kept in school until the seventh grade, whether or not they can read and write.

While India’s enrollment rate for primary school has reached nearly 90 percent, only about 50 percent go on to secondary school. Of those out of school, 41 percent are Dalits, or members of the lowest caste.

Just last month, India passed a new Right to Education Bill, which guarantees free and compulsory education to children ages 6-14. But Pradeep doubts that this will help keep Dalit children in school. “Teachers ask the children in the lower castes to sit at the back of the room so the other children aren’t defiled by them. They are even told that they can’t drink from the same water fountain,” she says. “They are abused with filthy words, so they drop out.”

Still, many advocates for global education say that attention is finally being paid to the issue of racial and ethnic disparity.

“Governments have begun to see that it’s to their advantage to educate all their people,’ says Steve Moseley, President of the Academy for Education Development, a U.S.-based nonprofit.

“It didn’t come up when they were laying out the Millennium Goals,” says Bryan,” “but once you had the goals, you had the question of why they were not reaching everybody, and then you had the question ‘well, who is everybody.’ So the Millennium Goals may have been responsible for this whole discussion coming to the fore.”

In 2003, the Romanian government got together with the U.N. to set goals for the country that go beyond the standard Millennium Goals – one target is to increase the literacy rate of the Roma population. “The Ministry of Education is finally dealing with this issue,” says Matache, “I think for sure that the participation of Roma will increase by 2015.”

“Brazil is doing far more than anyone else,” says Bryan. “One of the big things is affirmative action; that’s what’s happening in Brazil, and now Colombia is beginning to try it as well.”

According to Bryan, the new Minority Rights Group International report is the first ever to look globally at the issue of education for minority populations. He says this can serve as a baseline from which to measure future progress.

And Moseley believes that that progress is possible. “Even for those facing the greatest disadvantages – poverty, gender discrimination, racial discrimination — it is possible,” he says. “Because I’ve seen tremendous progress, I know it’s going to be possible. Maybe not by 2015, but it’s possible.”

Call (718) 506-1351 to join the conversation!

WIDE ANGLE’s unprecedented, award-winning 12-year documentary project, Time for School, follows seven kids in seven countries struggling to get what nearly all American kids take for granted: a basic education.

On Thursday, September 10th at 12:00 noon, EST, we’ll be hosting a live discussion with Oren Rudavsky and Frederick Rendina, two of the film’s producers, and two experts on global education: David Gartner of the Brookings Institute and Faryal Khan of UNESCO.

The discussion will be hosted by Pamela Hogan, Executive Producer of Time for School. You can read a Q & A with Hogan about the series on the Inside Thirteen blog.

Visit our site to listen live through Blog Talk Radio, and call (718) 506-1351 with any questions for our guests. You can also send us your questions in advance by leaving a comment below.

We’d especially like to hear from students and educators, and want to extend a special welcome to members of Classroom 2.0, a social network for people interested in using collaborative technologies in education.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meets with Russia’s Foreign Minister to discuss Iran’s nuclear program. A senior Russian official says that further sanctions against Iran would be “counterproductive,” and Clinton agrees that “we are not at that point yet.”

Russia and China agree to a framework for the export of Russian oil and gas supplies to China. The deal is part of $3.5 billion worth of trade agreements signed at a meeting between leaders of the two countries in Beijing.

Romania’s Democratic Liberal Government falls after loosing a vote of no confidence in parliament; the first such collapse since the end of Communist rule in 1989.

South African police fire tear gas and rubber bullets as thousands protest demanding basic services such as sanitation, electricity and housing in several northeastern townships.

“As heart wrenching as it is informative…. You’ll have a pit in your stomach by the end of the show.”
–Families.com

WIDE ANGLE’s unprecedented, award-winning 12-year documentary project, Time for School, returns in 2009 with visits to seven classrooms in seven countries to offer a glimpse into the lives of seven extraordinary children who are struggling to get what nearly all American kids take for granted: a basic education. We started filming in 2002, watching as kids first entered school in Afghanistan, Benin, Brazil, India, Japan, Kenya and Romania, many despite great odds. Several years later, in 2006, we returned to film an update — and now, three years later, we travel to check in on our young teenagers who are making the precarious transition to middle school. Among the highlights: in Afghanistan we reunite with 16-year-old Shugufa, who resolutely remains in school despite the Taliban’s recent acid attacks on young women her age. “If they continue attacking schools, our country won’t progress. Without an education you can’t get anywhere,” says Shufuga, whose own education was delayed when her family lived in a refugee camp in Pakistan during years when the Taliban ruled her country. We also visit the biggest slum in Nairobi, Kenya, where 15-year-old Joab’s mother has died and his father has abandoned the family. We watch as, incredibly, Joab manages to stay at the top of his class while also raising and feeding his two younger siblings. And in the blazing desert of Rajasthan, India, we encounter Neeraj, 15, only to learn that she has been unable to realize her dream of making it to 10th grade: since our last visit her night school has closed, and she now helps support her family by grazing the livestock full-time while her brothers continue their education.

These children’s stories put a human face on the shocking fact that more than 75 million children are currently out of school; of these, two thirds are girls. One in four children in developing countries does not complete five years of basic education, and there are nearly one billion illiterate adults — one-sixth of the world’s people. WIDE ANGLE plans to continue revisiting all the children, and their peers and families, through 2015, the year they should graduate — and, not coincidentally, the U.N.’s target date for achieving universal education, a Millennium Development goal endorsed by all 191 members of the United Nations.

While each child in Time for School 3 has a unique story, taken together their lives tell an epic tale, shedding light on one of the most urgent and under-reported stories of our time.

Part 2

Click on the images below to see messages from Shugufa in Afghanistan (left), and Nanavi in Benin (right).

Click on the videos below to see messages from Jefferson in Brazil, and Raluca in Romania.

Jefferson in Brazil
(View full post to see video)
Raluca in Romania

Click on any image to begin.

Gabriella Szekely, was a teacher in Rosia Montana for 34 years, but now has broken her ties with the village, and taken Gold Corporation’s money to leave. Margit Buran, a retired accountant is resolute –she won’t deal with the Canadian company.

The Rosia Montana gold mine has the potential for causing catastrophic environmental harm. In January 2000, heavy rains and snowfall flooded a holding pond of mining waste in the Romanian city of Baia Mare, spilling more than 20 million gallons of cyanide-laced sludge into the River Tisza.

Gold Corporation began buying out homeowners in 2002, offering either cash or a home in a new community. While many people are taking advantage of the buyouts, others, like farmer Eugen David, are resisting.

John Aston, vice president of the Rosia Montana Gold Corporation, describes the company’s plans in a positive light. Remus Celusa, a resident of Rosia Montana, wonders why the corporation can’t mine the gold “without destroying our mountain and everything we own.”

Gabriel Resources, a Canadian based multinational, plans to build the largest gold mine in Europe. Its subsidiary — Rosia Montana Gold Corporation — was granted a 20-year exploration license, but first it would have to buy up hundreds of houses and displace almost an entire village.

Download a PDF of the essay here.

Journalists are supposed to be impartial, but they rarely really are.

We gather information and then decide which bits to present to our audience and in what order to present them. It’s by definition a manipulative process.

That said, the serious journalist strives for balance and tries to present the audience with both sides of a story in order to allow the audience to decide which side it is on (or, at least, to lead the audience to the journalist’s desired conclusion without making it feel overly manipulated). Occasionally, though, journalists encounter a story where the moral argument seems so heavily weighted on one side that it is difficult to give both sides a fair shake.

The story of Rosia Montana is one such case.

Gabriel Resources is a gold mining company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange with a market capitalization of more than $600 million — down from over $1 billion at its peak. Its sole reason for being is to carve out what would be Europe’s largest open-pit gold mine, obliterating the Romanian town of Rosia Montana in the process.

A handful of Romanian villagers and farmers want to stop it.

How do you achieve balance between poor people attached to their land on one side and, on the other, sophisticated outsiders who would destroy that land for — let’s face it — simple greed? Gold is not in short supply, nor are its industrial applications particularly important or of particular benefit to mankind. Aside from diamonds, it’s one of the most frivolous commodities that man digs out of the ground.

But let’s try to give some balance nonetheless.

First, Rosia Montana was always a mining town. Gold has mined from the surrounding hills since before Roman times right up until two years ago. Open pit mining was introduced in the 1970s. It stopped because the rich lodes of ore had been exhausted and only capital-intensive large scale mining can make it profitable again.

Today, Rosia Montana is a dying town, a cluster of crumbling buildings and rutted roads at the end of a valley deep in Transylvania. The oft proffered notion that tourism could revive it is a fiction.

As mining towns go, it is only marginally charming and barely picturesque. It is a hardscrabble place whose most promising youths are drifting away, leaving behind a shrinking population of elderly residents and their least educated offspring.

Pollution has long been a problem there. The hills are honeycombed with ancient mines, and the top of one has been cut away, leaving an ugly open pit. Water leaches through the old mines and spills out in a toxic, rust-colored slurry of heavy metals that rushes downstream into the Danube. The town’s name, which means Red Mountain, comes as much from this runoff as it does from the color of the ore hidden in the ground.

Meanwhile, Romania is a relatively poor country, still struggling to meet the basic needs of its people nearly two decades after the collapse of a pernicious Communist regime. It has natural resources, but not the money or expertise to develop them fully.

Given those parameters, and given the soaring price of gold, one could easily argue that the best thing for Rosia Montana would be to invite international mining experts in to revive its abandoned mine. Investment would pour into the valley and the town’s youth would find jobs. The area would be transformed, even reborn.

That is what the people behind Gabriel Resources want to do and that is what many of Rosia Montana’s residents want to do. But they are opposed by a small group of local landowners, backed by a well-connected Swiss-born French activist who has rallied the international environmental movement to their cause.

Gabriel Resources was founded in the wake of Communism’s collapse by Romanian businessmen with little mining experience and suspected ties to the former secret police. They won a vast concession to exploit mineral deposits in Transylvania. That deal, itself, is clouded in controversy. The businessmen named their fledgling venture Gabriel, after a relative of one, and listed it on the speculative Vancouver stock exchange, giving it the gloss of a Canadian company.

Their initial approaches to local landowners were heavy handed and, in reaction, some of the landowners formed an association called Alburnus Maior — Rosia Montana’s Roman name — to try to stop the project. They were engaged in an ineffective letter-writing campaign when the founders of Gabriel Resources moved the company’s listing from Vancouver, British Columbia, to the more respectable Toronto Stock Exchange.

The opposition might have withered had it not been for an unrelated plan to build a Dracula theme park near the picturesque Romanian town of Sighisoara, once home to Vlad Dracula, the notorious Romanian ruler and inspiration for ”Dracula,” the Bram Stoker novel.

The plan outraged Prince Charles of Britain, who is fond of Romania’s old Saxon villages, of which Sighisoara is one. It also outraged Teddy Goldsmith, the aging anti-globalist environmentalist and scion of a wealthy business family.

A journalist who wrote for Mr. Goldsmith’s environmentalist magazine, The Ecologist, moved to Romania to help defeat the project. With such powerful forces aligned against it, the proposed Sighisoara theme park died.

While in Romania, the journalist, who was born in Switzerland but carries a French passport, heard about the Gabriel Resources’ plan for Rosia Montana and went to meet its opponents. Within months, she had introduced them to some of the most powerful environmental organizations in the world.

Gabriel Resources, meanwhile, was taken over by professionals and is now run by savvy and experienced mining men, many of whom cut their teeth building Barrick Gold Corp., one of the largest gold mining companies in the world.

From the mining company’s point of view and from the point of view of those residents who support the project and all of the economic benefits it might bring, the opponents are risking the greater good for their own self interest.

The multi-billion-dollar project would extract an estimated 300 tons of gold and 1,200 tons of silver from the earth and would plow billions of dollars into the Romanian economy. It could earn Gabriel Resources and its shareholders billions more in profit.

The Rosia Montana project only represents about half of the mineral rights won by the original Romanian businessmen. The investors in those rights are waiting patiently to see if the Rosia Montana projects proceeds, opening the door for even more large-scale open-pit mining in the area.

Of course, as with any sizeable investment, business and environmental considerations have become infused with politics on local, national and even supra-national levels. Gabriel Mining has been aggressive in recruiting local political support by employing city officials or handing jobs out to their family members.

The debate has been more complex nationally, where politicians are mindful of the increased international scrutiny brought by the country’s recent membership in the European Union. Late last year, a regional court annulled an archeological permit that would have allowed Gabriel Mining to destroy vestiges of Roman activity in the area. More critically, the company has suspended much of its work while fighting in the courts with Romania’s Environmental Ministry, which has suspended its review of Gabriel Mining’s environmental impact study, a necessary step in starting the project.

As part of their campaign to win over public opinion, Gabriel Resources financed a documentary called Mine Your Own Business, arguing that the Rosia Montana controversy is an example of affluent, sentimental environmentalists preventing the world’s poor from developing economically.

But, economics aside, it is difficult to champion a mining company against people who care about Mother Earth.

Mining is one of the world’s most unpopular industries these days, particularly the kind that leaves the earth permanently scarred with moonscape-like craters a mile or more wide. The Rosia Montana project would gouge out several hills, leaving four yawning pits in their place, and slowly fill an entire valley with wastewater and tailings that would take years to solidify.

Still more worrying is Gabriel Resources’ planned use of large quantities of highly toxic cyanide to separate gold and silver from the ore. Memories in the region are still fresh of an accident at another gold mine 80 miles north of Rosia Montana in which a dam holding back a cyanide-laced lake burst in 2000, contaminating water for hundreds of miles downstream, deep into Hungary.

Gabriel Resources says it would build in safeguards that were missing at that mine. It also promises to clean up pollution left by past mining operations and do as much as possible to repair the altered landscape after its project is done.

But mining companies always make promises and accidents still happen.

WIDE ANGLE’s Gold Futures, in fact, is a reflection of those fears. While WIDE ANGLE’s editors have worked hard to produce a balanced account, it is based on a documentary, New Eldorado. Gold. The Curse of Rosia Montana, by a Hungarian environmentalist filmmaker with financing that came, in part from Hungary’s Ministry of Environment and Water Conservancy and the Budapest waterworks.

Gabriel Resources is what is called a “junior company” in the mining trade. It does not have the money, people or equipment needed to carry out the Rosia Montana project. That is the job of “senior companies,” like Newmont Mining, which holds a 20 percent stake in Gabriel Resources.

It is possible that Gabriel Resources would become a senior company were the project to win all of the approvals necessary to proceed. But it is more likely that the company would sell the project to an established senior company. At that point, all of the promises that Gabriel has made would pass to someone else to fulfill.

Craig S. Smith is a journalist who covered Rosia Montana’s gold mine in the article “Fighting Over Gold in the Land of Dracula,” published in the New York Times in 2007.