Sandzak Textile Firms Spy Hope in EU Deal

At 6.30am every working day, Munir Ferizovic, 52, a worker at one of the many tailors shops in Novi Pazar, is hurrying along Dubrovacka Street to work.

For 30 years, Ferizovic worked at the state owned Raska company, whose three big plants formed the mainstay of Novi Pazar's textile industry.

Since the state firm collapsed, Ferizovic has struggled to keep his family of five together, making about 300 euro a month working for private entrepreneurs.

He arrives at his job still tired from the previous day and starts working amid the deafening noise of about 50 sewing machines.

"I know when my day starts but when it finishes is another question," he said, lighting a cigarette with calloused hands, dyed blue from years of handling denim.

"Sometimes we finish at 6pm but at other times we work until the small hours," he added. "It's difficult but I have to make ends meet."

Ferizovic's grim working day, involving long hours, a small pay packet and no social insurance, is typical of many in this town of around 100,000 people.

In the sanctions-hit Serbia of the 1990s, the private entrepreneurs that sprang out of the ruins of the old Raska firm made substantial profits from producing and marketing jeans and other clothing items.

Buyers flocked to Novi Pazar's market and on Sundays more than 50 buses and hundreds of cars would descend on the largest town in the Sandzak region from all over Serbia and Montenegro.

The buyers snapped up the locally made high-quality, fake brand name products and resold them at much higher prices in boutiques and flea markets across the country.

But with the jeans boom of the 1990s a thing of the past, most locals are resigned to much less profitable working lives – when they are not totally unemployed.

Textile industry chiefs believe a new textile agreement between Serbia and Montenegro and the European Union due to be signed at the end of March, scrapping the quotas on textile imports, will improve matters.

According to Blagomir Jovanovic, secretary of the textile association of Serbia, the agreement represents a chance to establish links that were broken under the isolation and economic sanctions of the Milosevic years.

"I expect improvement in cooperation with other European states. Our textile industry was in dire straits for so long. With EU enlargement, Serbia has a chance to get important jobs - more in the finishing phase of products as our textile industry does not have enough raw-materials."

The Belgrade government believes the deal will restore the textile industry to pre-war levels of prosperity, which in 1991 earned the country a billion US dollars a year.

"Textile exports will grow by 50 per cent this year," Slobodan Milosavljevic, the chairman of Serbia's Chamber of Commerce, told IWPR. "I'm optimistic about it."

Local manufacturers are more divided over the potential benefits of the agreement.

Tigrin Kacar, owner of the Stig children's clothes company, said he had big hopes for the EU agreement.

"If they remove quotas, we will be competing on fair and equal footing with the world," he told IWPR. "Given the quality of our goods, we'll have an open door to foreign markets."

But Fuad Ugljanin, owner of the Bruk textile firm, said he feared that the agreement looked better on paper than it would turn out in reality.

Although the deal abolishes quotas on textile imports from Serbia, Ugljanin points out that Serbia is not the only, or the main, beneficiary of this relaxation in trade policy.

"The agreement also applies to countries with much more developed textile industries, such as China, India, Turkey and other Asian countries," he told IWPR.

Ugljanin said Serbia's only advantage over these other competitors was its proximity to Europe, "This should be put to good use because we have an experienced workforce, churning out high-quality products."

Bisera Seceragic, who recently co-authored a study of Serbia's textile industry, said the EU deal might restore some of the former glory of Novi Pazar's textile market.

However, she did not want to underplay the extent of the current crisis. "Since mid-2003, production of jeans and prêt-à-porter clothes in Novi Pazar has been in deep recession," she told IWPR.

"There are only about 5-6,000 textile workers left in the town compared to 15,000 in the Nineties, when the average monthly turnover of the textile market was regularly worth 10 million euro.

"Since 2002 it has dropped to around 5 million euro."

Seceragic listed several factors behind the textile recession. One was the shrinkage of the domestic market, which is a consequence of Serbia's general economic malaise.

Another was the closure of foreign markets, which is partly a result of the international administration's actions in neighbouring Kosovo.

They have clamped down on the activities of the smugglers who used to funnel goods from Novi Pazar through Kosovo to Europe.

"If private entrepreneurs can find buyers in foreign markets, it will solve many of their problems," said Seceragic.

"Both entrepreneurs and workers will then be better off. The agreement paves the way for both new contracts, and higher wages."

It is an optimistic prognosis. Although the workforce in Novi Pazar is cheap by European standards, labour costs in Asian countries are lower.

Irfan Sarenkapic, head of the Sandzak Development Agency, based in Novi Pazar, says this means that local manufacturers must adapt by becoming more ambitious - slashing prices and going for higher quality products.

"We cannot compete with Asian textile producers simply with cut-throat prices but perhaps the way out may be manufacturing higher quality fashion items," he said.

"The entrepreneurs should also accept so-called loan jobs, where foreign buyers provide the raw materials and our workers provide sewing and stitching services.

"This agreement is not going to put Novi Pazar back at the top of the textile industry in the country but it may help increase production and so create new jobs."

Zeljo Arifovic, a worker at the Nesal private jeans company in Novi Pazar, said he doubted Novi Pazar's many small firms were up to such ambitious and complex challenges.

"The textile workers and the manufacturers don't know anything about value-added tax or what this agreement will bring to them," he said.

"All they know is that they don't like the financial police – that's what bothers them, not how to import jeans fabrics from Turkey."

Amela Bajrovic is a journalist working with Radio Sto Plus in Novi Pazar.