THE HANDSTAND

DECEMBER 2002

PROBLEMS FACING ROMA

FROM REPORTS BY THE POET PAUL POLANSKY

The pervasive and well-founded fear for their personal safety is perhaps the greatest problem facing the Roma in post-war Kosovo. As Polansky’s survey and field reports describe in detail, most Roma who remain in Kosovo are simply afraid to step foot outside their homes/villages.

Roma are fearful that they may be beaten or shot if they leave their homes. They are afraid to speak their native language in public. They fear sending their children to schools, and fear visiting family members who may live only miles away. These fears are based on very clear and present dangers on the ground.

Data collected by Polansky from his Summer 2001 visit reveals that one-third of the communities surveyed that had a Romani population prior to the 1999 war now have no Roma at all.

Even after the arrival in Kosovo of NATO's KFOR (Kosovo peace keeping forces) in June 1999, approximately 12,600 homes occupied by Roma were partially or, in most cases, completely destroyed.

Eyewitness testimony gathered by Polansky and other Voice of Roma delegates in visits to Kosovo and Macedonia in 1999, 2000 and 2001, along with reports by other human rights organizations, demonstrate a systematic campaign of persecution and ethnic cleansing of the Roma by extremist ethnic Albanians.

In mid-1999, the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) sent a fact-finding mission to Kosovo. In what it characterized as a "pogrom situation," the ERRC documented an array of gross human rights violations inflicted on Roma, primarily at the hands of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians: murder, abductions, rape, torture, illegal detention, confiscation of property and personal belongings, expulsions from homes and communities, looting and destruction of Romani homes, and other humiliating and degrading treatment on a "mass scale." The ERRC states that the Kosovar Albanians are "evidently intent on purging Kosovo of Roma"³ in the wake of the Yugoslav military’s withdrawal from the region in June 1999.

These human rights abuses against Roma are also documented in a Human Rights Watch report which observes that:

Again, it is particularly disturbing to note that these widespread and egregious human rights violations occur despite the presence of international KFOR forces, that were deployed presumably to facilitate and safeguard Kosovo’s passage to becoming a multi-ethnic society.

In a letter dated July 16, 1999 to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, the ERRC stated that its researchers in the Prishtina area "repeatedly witnessed KFOR officers failing to react to the looting and burning of Romani houses occurring in their proximity." ERRC researchers who traveled to the British, French and Italian KFOR zones report they "witnessed numerous instances in which KFOR representatives did not react in situations of mass or individual looting, carried out openly and in broad daylight.
³ "Roma and the Kosovo Conflict," Roma Rights, Number 2, 1999, newsletter of the European Roma Rights Center.
⁴ "Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: Abuses Against Serbs and Roma in the New Kosovo," Human Rights Watch Report, 3 August, 1999.

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The general population shifts amongst the Roma in Kosovo from Summer 1999 to Summer 2001 are as follows:

• Of the 267 villages surveyed by Polansky that had Romani populations prior to March 1999, 70% (187) lost over half of their prewar population; and of those, 52% (98) lost all of their Romani population.
• There were a few villages that actually had an increase in the Romani population due to families relocating within Kosovo in the aftermath of the war; the 3 villages with the highest increases were all located in Istok .

The massive ethnic cleansing and internal displacement of Roma in Kosovo depicted above translates to a decrease of 75% of the prewar Romani population, primarily in the summer months of 1999 when the triumphant ethnic Albanian population (re)possessed Kosovo under the protection of KFOR "peacekeeping" forces. These vast numbers of frightened and desperate Roma were driven from Kosovo in spite of the fact that there were over 300 international NGOs providing humanitarian aid and assistance on the ground in Kosovo during this period. Of the tens of thousands of Roma who fled Kosovo, some joined relatives in overcrowded homes or makeshift Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in Serbia, others arrived in ill-equipped refugee camps in Macedonia and Montenegro, while many others took dangerous, overcrowded fishing boats from Montenegro to Italy, or, traumatized by months of bombing in Belgrade, attempted to cross by car or train from Hungary or Italy to Austria and Germany. Everywhere they went, they were met with a lack of compassion for their plight, refused recognition as refugees and asylum seekers, and whenever possible sent back to Kosovo.

It is therefore amazing to note that even with so little help and lack of acceptance as refugees abroad, less than 4% of the Kosovo Romani population who were externally displaced returned to Kosovo in the two year interim period from Summer 1999 to Summer 2001. Why? Sadly, we must conclude that life in Kosovo for the Roma in the aftermath of the NATO intervention has and continues to be so precarious and so miserable, that in spite of their extremely strong desire to go home, most Roma choose instead to face the harshness and uncertainties of temporary and often illegal or clandestine residency elsewhere.

What accounts for these losses in each municipality and/or region shown below? To answer this question, we must briefly review aspects of the recent geo-political history of the region of Kosovo in Yugoslavia and how the Roma fit into the picture over the past several decades.

The Tito period (1945-1981) was the most stable time for Roma in Yugoslavia, socially and economically, though discrimination against them remained systematic. Tito's death in 1981 heralded the onset of major economic and political turmoil in Yugoslavia. The decline and ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s further exacerbated the economic tumult, giving rise to a number of diverse right wing nationalist movements throughout Yugoslavia who mobilized to demand secession from the Serbian-dominated federal government. The gains the Roma had achieved in the Tito years sank overnight. With unemployment skyrocketing, the discrimination against Roma trying to find work got much worse. A wave of racist violence grew to engulf Romani communities all over Yugoslavia as Serb, Croat and other nationalist movements proceeded to carve up the remains of Yugoslavia, ethnically cleansing "the other" in their respective domains.

In the 1980s, a growing number of Kosovo's majority Albanian population agitated to turn the province into an ethnically pure republic, free of all non-Albanian groups. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA or UCK) emerged as the primary expression of Albanian separatism. The second largest population in Kosovo, the Serbs, resisted any such effort to divorce Kosovo from Yugoslavia. Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Yugoslavia at that time, revoked the autonomous status in Kosovo and reinstalled the minority Serbian government, which began oppressing ethnic Albanians. By the mid-1990s, the struggle between Serbs and Albanians erupted into violent civil war. Kosovo’s Roma were tragically caught in the crossfire.

As documented by Amnesty International and others, the KLA began to persecute all of Kosovo’s non-Albanians at the same time that Serbian authorities and Serb paramilitary groups were viciously attacking Albanians. The attempt by Roma in general to steer a neutral course was viewed by both Serbs and Albanians as collaboration with the enemy.

When NATO intervened with its bombing campaign on behalf of the Albanians, it precipitated the massive flight of Kosovo’s Serb, Albanian, Roma and other populations. Some Roma who remained in Kosovo were brutally harassed by Serbian militias for allegedly helping their Albanian neighbors; many more were attacked and often killed by KLA forces who embarked on a systematic and largely successful effort to rid Kosovo of its entire non-Albanian population.

While the Roma have always faced discrimination and oppression throughout former Yugoslavia from Serbs, Croats and Albanians alike, after the 1999 war the terrible treatment of Roma in Kosovo increased dramatically. On the pretext that the Roma had been Serb collaborators, many Albanians forced Romani families to leave their homes on a moment’s notice. Roma were stripped of their possessions, tortured, raped, disappeared, and killed in Albanian pogroms.

Although there may have been minimal coerced collaboration of some Roma in certain Serb dominated regions, this was not, by any means, a Kosovo-wide phenomenon. Indeed, based on firsthand observations, experiences and interviews with displaced Roma in and from Kosovo, Polansky and others have documented the absence of Roma collaboration with the Serbs in their conflict with the Albanians.

Ceda Prlincevic, head of the Jewish community in Prishtina, who himself was robbed of his possessions and forced to flee, states: "To [the KLA-UCK] everybody was a collaborator who was against the secession, no matter if they were Serbs, Roma, Gorans, Jews and even Albanians."²¹

The end of the NATO bombing campaign marked the return of power in Kosovo to the Albanians, now with the additional support of US and European governments, the protection of UNMIK and KFOR, and the worldwide assumption that the Albanians were "right" and the Serbs were "evil" and the "humanitarian bombing" was a success. The massive support of the West and the postwar Albanian triumph emboldened hardcore nationalists who had always wanted and fought for an "ethnically pure" Albanian Kosovo. Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright repeatedly reminded ethnic Albanians, both during and after the NATO intervention, that there would be no partitioning of Kosovo, as this solution "… is against the theories that we have had about [preserving] a multiethnic (sic) society."²² But the dream of a "Greater Albania," which would link the ethnic Albanian populations of Kosovo and Macedonia (and even Greece and Bulgaria) to Albania, still motivates Albanian extremists in their actions against the few remaining ethnic minority populations in Kosovo.

²¹ Cited in "650 Years of Roma Culture in Kosovo," Holl, Kurt et al. Eds. Rom e.V., Cologne, 2000.
²² "Slippery solutions for a Kosovo peace," Christian Science Monitor, 14 April, 1999.

June 9, 2001

On the highway leading into Mitrovice was a large sign announcing that World Vision was rebuilding all the homes in Mitrovice. Ibraim said no Romani or Ashkaljie homes were being rebuilt, only Albanian homes. Before the war, Ibraim said there were 7,000 Roma/Ashkaljie in Mitrovice. Most of them were now in refugee camps in Montenegro. He doubted that they would ever be allowed to return to Mitrovice. He said that ACT and other aid agencies were talking about building them 50 barracks in a park near the football stadium. He didn’t know when this would happen. He hoped soon, because the conditions in this camp were very difficult. [Polansky Field Notes, 2001]

June 21, 2001

Prior to the NATO-US war, 6,000 Roma lived in Gjilani. Only 350 Roma remain today. The situation for these Roma is extremely urgent as all international aid agencies ceased distributing aid in March 2001. One KFOR soldier admitted that…since the NGOs and UNHCR were cutting back aid to the Roma it was hard to see how they were going to survive.

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