“If we want change, we must start from ourselves, teach our sons not to beat their girlfriends, instead of teach our daughters to be obedient”, says Almira Fazli from the Shuto Orizari Women’s Initiative at CIVIL’s panel “Gender Equality in North Macedonia: Between Declarations and Reality”.
Fazli stressed that recently a “Roma public room” appeared on the social networks, in which compromising photos and videos of Roma women and girls were published.
“We reported the case to the police and after a few days that Facebook page was deleted, now we don’t know whether the police did that or the admins themselves deleted it”, says Fazli.
She says that from next year they will be an independent NGO and will separate from HERA, with which they have been cooperating for 12 years.
“We are primarily working on sexual and reproductive health of Roma women and the discrimination of health workers against the Roma community. We are also enabling Roma women to have free gynecological examinations. We are also filling out documents for people who do not know how to fill out certain documents, often institutions return their documents because they are filled out with a pencil or black pen”, says Fazli.
The panel is part of the project “European Perspectives” that CIVIL is implementing with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany.
D.M
camera: Atanas Petrovski
editing: Arian Mehmeti
photo: Goran Naumovski
Translation: N. Cvetkovska
