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The needs assessment was designed and initiated as a collaborative effort between ECMI’s headquarters in Flensburg, Germany, and its Regional Office in Skopje, which has been in operation since early 2001.
ECMI Flensburg boasts an international team of researchers and conflict management experts backed up by an administrative infrastructure with experience in organizing international conferences, meetings and training seminars. Amongst its Flensburg-based staff, this project was administered by:
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Eben Friedman (USA)
Project Leader
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Senior Research Associate. After spending two years conducting fieldwork in Macedonia and Slovakia, he completed his PhD in political science at the University of California, San Diego in September of 2002. The title of his dissertation was “Explaining the Political Integration of Minorities: Roms as a Hard Case.” He also holds an MA in political science from the Johns Hopkins University. At ECMI, he is responsible for projects with Roms, including the Sida-funded needs assessment conducted in Macedonia in fall 2003. |
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ECMI has operated a Regional Office in Skopje since early 2001. The Regional Office Team, which took an active role in the design and set-up of the project, was led until November 2004 by:
Sunoor Verma (India)
Project Advisor
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Head of Strategic Partnerships and Regional Administration. A cardiac surgeon by training, Dr. Verma is also an expert on project management, proposal writing, fundraising, negotiation, and organizational sustainability. After serving as medical advisor to the UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) Humanitarian Evacuation Program during the 1999 Kosovo refugee crisis, he worked as a project management consultant to the Center for Refugees and Forced Migration Studies in Skopje. After joining ECMI in January 2001, he led the formation of the ECMI NGO Network for the Improvement of Interethnic Relations in the Republic of Macedonia and the development of the Network into a resource for other national and regional initiatives.
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Within the Regional Office Team in Skopje, this project also drew on the skills, contacts, and experience of a Finance Manager and an Office Manager/Project Management Assistant.
ECMI opened an office in Belgrade for the purposes of the project, employing a
Project Coordinator and three Project Assistants on a temporary basis to support
project implementation.
Nataša Markovska (Macedonia)
Project Coordinator
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Worked for the last decade in the field of minority rights. Before joining the Project Team, she worked in 2003 at the Mental Disability Advocacy Centre in Budapest, where she was engaged in advocating for the rights of the mentally disabled in Central and Southeastern Europe. Prior to that engagement, she worked on various projects for women and Roms under the auspices of the Open Society Institute – Macedonia.
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Katarina Crnjanski (Serbia and Montenegro)
Project Assistant
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Graduated in 2004 from the Political Science Faculty of the University of Belgrade with a major in international relations. The title of her final thesis was “The Position of National Minorities in the Legal and Political System of the Republic of Serbia”. She has been active since 2000 in several NGOs concerned with human rights and the European Union, also working as a volunteer on projects of various student and youth organizations.
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Branislav Mitrović (Serbia and Montenegro)
Project Assistant
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Currently works as a volunteer in the NGO “Romani Heart”. As a Community Advocate in the CARE-funded programme by the same name since 2002, he has conducted focus groups in Romani settlements on residents’ day-to-day problems. Active in the Romani movement since 1999, he served in various capacities on the staff of the Romani radio station Khrlo e Romengo (Voice of Roms) in 2000. Additionally, to encourage participation in the 2004 parliamentary elections among both Roms and non-Roms, he took part in the door-to-door campaign organized for this purpose by the National Democratic Institute.
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Slavica “Lola” Vasić (Serbia and Montenegro)
Project Assistant
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Became involved in the Romani movement in 1996, working first as a journalist with Radio Belgrade’s Romani desk and later in a coordinative role in the NGO Romani Culture Centre and as an organizer of cultural events about Roms. In 2001, she joined the expert team of the Serbian Ministry of Education to work on the strategy for improving the level of education of the Romani population. At present, she serves as a coordinator in the Romani NGO Children’s Centre “Little Prince” in Belgrade, also working as a short-term consultant for the Decade of Roma Inclusion in the World Bank’s Belgrade office
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In Belgrade, the project also benefited from the knowledge and experience of:
Florian Bieber (Luxembourg)
Project
consultant
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Senior Non-resident Research Associate. Based in Belgrade, Dr. Bieber teaches at the Central European University in Budapest and at the Regional Masters Program for Democracy and Human Rights in Sarajevo. He has published articles on power-sharing, institutional design and nationalism in Southeastern Europe. In addition to being the author of two forthcoming books, Ethnic Structure, Inequality and Governance of the Public Sector: Bosnia-Herzegovina (2004, forthcoming) and Serbian Nationalism from the Death of Tito to the Fall of Milošević (2004, in German, forthcoming), he edited Montenegro in Transition: Problems of Identity and Statehood (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2003); Reconstructing Multiethnic Societies: The Case of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001, with Džemal Sokolović); and Understanding the War in Kosovo (London: Frank Cass, 2003, with Židas Daskalovski). He is also the co-editor of the journal Southeast European Politics and editor of the electronic network Balkan Academic News.
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