The Black Chronicles of Integration Yana DOMUSCHIEVA
If I were to guess what the lucky charm drawn by the Bulgarians with disabilities from the New Year banitsa was, I would say that it was “humiliation”. Bulgaria may be a fully-fledged EU member state, it may be party to many documents protecting human dignity, but, this has no effect on its disabled citizens. To receive the meager integration allowance, aimed at compensating your disability in the festive 2007, you need to first queue in a long line at your local Social Assistance Directorate. Just like any other year. But, surprise, surprise! Now you need to provide a certificate from your general practitioner. However, s/he could only see you after several hours of waiting with all his/her flu patients, and then would just tell you s/he has never heard of such a document. Back to the line at the social services. So you are requesting an integration allowance, but you are using MTel’s special 10-leva package for the hearing-impaired? In this case, you are not entitled to any assistance for information services! The social assistance authorities in another municipality are granting such allowances? It may be so, but they are interpreting the law in a different way! A toll tax pass for the car you use to drive your disabled child to the doctor, the speech- and physiotherapist? Sure, but only if the vehicle is owned by the child (?!). These are not excerpts from Catch-22 but only a few of the January experiences of disabled friends and acquaintances. I do not even have to exaggerate for dramatic effect. Every single national media outlet covered the lines winding into the streets, the overwhelmed social workers and their desperate clients. This is the outcome of the amended Integration of People with Disabilities Act, adopted hastily after a superficial debate at the end of 2006. The supplementary implementation regulations and ordinances, together with the new application, certificate and declaration forms, were not available until the first week of January, thus hampering the work of the social services, which are not awfully flexible anyway. The general practitioners, also involved in the procedure for allocating integration allowances, learned about their new obligation from their patients. The form they need to fill is still being drafted, while the deadline for the submission of applications expires at the end of the month. People with disabilities themselves are not very aware of their rights. Traditionally, the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy does not provide information for free and has not printed a single brochure or poster to explain the new rules and procedures regarding the integration allowances. As a result, the queues at the local Social Assis1 OBEKTIV
tance directorates are full not only of people filing support applications, but also by clients with questions and concerns. Many of them are not aware that there is nothing to line for anymore, as the access to integration allowances was tightened at the end of 2006. In response to the chaos that ensued, at a press conference of the Social Assistance Agency on January 18, the Deputy-Minister of Labor and Social Policy reminded that applications for allowances are also accepted by mail. Wonderful, at least one sign of civilization in the system! But... I cannot get away without queuing at the Social Assistance office. Only the staff there can tell me what documents and in how many copies should I mail them... There are more and more absurd stories, sufficient for a comprehensive dictionary of humiliation. The current mess is only a fraction of the barriers erected in 2006 by the Bulgarian decision-makers before people with disabilities. Here are the black chronicles. In the summer, a 20 % VAT was levied on technical aids. In December, the State Budget Act repealed the duty-free imports of such means of assistance. This has resulted in more expensive prostheses and compensatory devices for which the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy provides allowances that have remained unchanged since 1996. The amendments to the Integration of People with Disabilities Act of November 2006 complicated access to financial aid, leaving people with less than 71% loss of working capacity to integrate without assistance.* The information system of the Agency for People with Disabilities, which could provide the most precise data on the number of disabled persons in Bulgaria, including disaggregated data by type of disability, has not been completed for a second consecutive year. Implementing a working social policy or ensuring the cost-efficiency of the ministries involved without such data is simply impossible. The pledged architectural and information accessibility did not materialize either. The assessment of disabilities is still based on medical criteria alone, together with general diseases, as if the disabled are not citizens but only patients who have no choice - as it had been in EU countries until the middle of the past century. Are we going to catch up with Europeans? Hardly, as we continue to walk backwards.
* See Obektiv, No. 137, 2006.