ON February 17, Bulgarian Socialist Party MP Toma Tomov said that more than 200 million euro provided for Roma integration over the last five years was "unaccounted for". He said that the National Council on Ethnic and Demographic Issues that is responsible for it must be reorganised.

This article aims to shed some light on shady Roma integration issues as part of a longer series. It starts in the Hristo Botev quarter in Sofia's northern outskirts, where Sofia municipality started demolishing illegal Roma houses as part of a bigger campaign to clean its property of unregulated construction in September last year. It includes no reference to government institutions as the institutions either reported their public relations officers to be ill, or had not responded to inquiries by the time of publication.

"You take bus 79 here and it takes you there." This is how a woman selling tickets and newspapers on Botevgradsko Shosse (Botevgrad road) explains how to get to the Hristo Botev quarter. This "there", however, seems to start at least at a kilometre radius away; on the rail tracks of Botevgradsko Shosse; in the No 22 tram racketing along where a woman pensioner says that "the biggest immigrants and thieves and idiots live there"; on the faces of people on the 79 bus. You can tell you are near it from the dust on the clothes of the Roma, the directness with which some of them stare at you, the total oblivion on the faces of others. "If I could, I would sell my house in the Hristo Botev vicinity and would buy one in Simeonovo," the woman says.

The street that leads to the Roma ghetto is called Bessarabia and so is the Roma ghetto. On Bessarabia Street, a computer software company called SES - Software Engineering and Solutions - has built its shiny house and raised the EU flag next to the Bulgarian flag. The ironies start there. When you enter the yard and ask what that building is, out of sheer curiously, cocksure Bulgarians ask you what business you have there. Further inside the ghetto, the mud grows thicker and deeper but people, funnily enough, are more open and ready to help with information.

Along the road I meet a dark-skinned man raking a heap of mud and refuse with a rod. I ask him where the illegal houses that the government razed last September were and where their inhabitants have moved, and whether he knows anything about it. He says that he lives there and that he himself does not have a document for the ground where the house was built. And that "they" may come and raze it any time, although his wife's family has had the place since the 1950s or 1960s. When they were buying the land, they did not take a document, he says. They just paid. "Our fate is scary," he says. His name is Iordan. He has been unemployed for 11 years and lives only on his wife's 150 leva salary and occasional bank loans. His two grown children live outside Sofia. He tries to make some money by selling scrap iron. It's 20 stotinki a kilogram but they change the price each time, he says.

He shows me the way to the Bessarabia ghetto. The streets there have no names, they only have numbers. The name Bessarabia is also quite telling. Bessarabia is also the name of the naked, barren valleys of Moldova and the Ukraine where Bulgarians started settling in the late 18th century. The name came from the Thracian tribe Besi, which Roman emperor Trajan banished to the north of the Danube in the 2nd century. There are about 88 419 Bulgarians who currently live in the Bessarabia valleys. In 2005, 20 000 of them were waiting for Bulgarian identification documents. Only 10 per cent received them. Giving that same name to a Sofia ghetto, or mahala, to use the Turkish word for neighbourhood, says enough about how those people feel there - like outcasts and "immigrants" in their own country.

Ognian Kamenov, director of the NGO Integro (short for Integration of the Roma), which deals with Roma housing issues in Bulgarian villages, says that "the immigrants'" road to Sofia often starts like this: "There is a village (in the Sliven area) called Sotiria. The Roma in the outskirts feed from the rubbish bins, and those in the centre feed from hope itself. They call them the naked gypsies. There is this distribution of rubbish bins there -  who has the right to rummage in which bin. And there's very often people with no IDs and no education. Some kids roam the streets; those kids don't exist anywhere. They speak Bulgarian but they are not registered anywhere. And they are often as old as 15. And then someone tells those kids that the rubbish bins in Sofia are full of food and they get on the trains. The policemen take them off and in 10 minutes they are back on the trains again and they get to Sofia…"

The Bulgarian Roma ghettos that they reach often have names just as evocative as Bessarabia - Abyssinia and Cambodia are two other examples, according to a 2002 World Bank report. Housing options for Roma there are limited by discrimination by municipal officials and landlords, an inheritance of the housing policies of successive empires, socialist regimes, and recent governments, which have led to the regional and geographic isolation and segregation of Roma neighbourhoods. This has, according to the same World Bank report, in turn limited access to public services and raised questions about land and property ownership. Compounded by discrimination by some surrounding communities and municipal governments, conditions in many Roma settlements deteriorate significantly. In some cases, local governments attempt to reduce illegal tenancy by moving settlements to the outskirts of towns. Like they did with the Kamenare village in the Varna region in the 60s and 70s that Kamenov talks about: "The Roma there were moved out of some pretty lands and made to settle in that Varna village. The land in their previous settlement had been good and their houses had been illegal, so they just demolished them and moved them out. In Kamenare, they built some small concrete houses for them."

Kamenov says that ownership of land is a problem all over Bulgaria. Fifty per cent of Roma property is usually regulated, or legally owned by Roma families. He mentions the case of the Marchevo village in southwestern Buglaria. The Roma houses there were illegally built before 1989. Most of those Bulgarians no longer live there. Still, the NGO and the Roma had to fight a lot before they convinced Bulgarians not to demolish the Roma houses and move the Roma out. "The Roma settled there in '58 when a decree prohibiting nomadic migration came out. Everyone had to have an address and they couldn't travel. ?he Marchevo Roma were basket weavers; they travelled with their baskets and lived in their carts. When they settled in '58 they had to be signed in. But nobody in the municipality cared to do it and they ended up outside the registries. So all of a sudden (it turned out that) those Roma have houses built before November 10 (1989, when communism in Bulgaria fell), but the land where they built the houses is somebody else's." At the moment, some of the land is restituted to Bulgarians and some of it is regulated as agricultural land and given to the Roma. Nobody dares demolish houses built on Bulgarian land because there would be a scandal. "I guess they are just waiting for some time to pass," Kamenov says.

This may also be the case with the illegal houses left in Sofia's Hristo Botev quarter. Or in the rest of the Sofia quarters with illegal Roma houses in Krasna Poliana, Lulin, Serdika, Poduene, Orlandovtsi, Zaharna Fabrika, and Vrubnitsa.