ROMA in Kosovo were victims of both Serbs and Albanians during the conflict there, and their suffering was intensified with the NATO war against Yugoslavia, according to the testimonies of displaced Roma from Kosovo. When not specified otherwise, the spelling of geographic names in Kosovo is in the Serbian language. Finally, Orhan Galjus talks about what it was like growing up Romani in Kosovo. Next, the „Advocacy" section of the newsletter presents the declaration of a joint European Roma Rights Center/Human Rights Project conference on Roma, Peace and Security in the Balkans. The „Field Report" section of Roma Rights which follows the „Notebook" contains the record of ERRC missions to document the situation of Roma in Kosovo, June 30 - July 7, and in Albania to document the situation of Kosovo Romani refugees, May 29 - June 6. Next, accounts of anti-Romani violence and expulsions by returning Kosovo Albanians are presented, along with the forced return by the Serbian police of fleeing or expelled Roma to Kosovo, from other parts of Yugoslavia. Following this, the Romani flight abroad, to Montenegro and to the Yugoslav interior is documented, along with an episode of attempted lynching in a refugee camp in Macedonia. The first piece documents wartime abuses of Roma in Kosovo, including expulsions, rape and forced labour by the Serbian police and killings by the Kosovo Liberation Army. The following is a necessarily fragmented and incomplete catalogue of the war on Roma in Kosovo. Roma who fled abroad to places where they could speak freely decried the conflict as not their own. Legends spread in an increasingly isolated Serbia, such as the newly-invented folktale, calculated solely to exact exaggerated displays of loyalty, that „If the Roma abandon us, Serbia is truly alone." On the ground in Kosovo, as legends of Romani loyalty to Miloševi ć became embedded in the hearts and minds of ethnic Albanians, exacting standards of loyalty among the Albanian community on the one hand, and the omnipresent Serbian police on the other, rendered Roma effectively mute. The overwhelming majority of Roma remained politically unengaged and desperately attempted to carve out niches for themselves where they might be spared the coming ethnic maelstrom in a move pondered over with wonder by some anthropologists in the West, small groups of Roma in both Yugoslavia and Macedonia who had formerly declared themselves to be Albanians in the Yugoslav census, registered themselves as „Egyptians" and entered into dialogue with the Egyptian embassy in Belgrade. ![]() Romani leaders from Kosovo attended the negotiations over Kosovo in Rambouillet, France in the early months of 1999, as members of the Serbian delegation. In 1989, in an action which will likely not be forgotten soon by the Kosovo Albanians, some Roma in Belgrade demonstrated under a banner stating „We are behind you, Slobo" in support of the abrogation of the autonomy of the Kosovo province. Roma were forced to choose a side in a conflict in which there was no Romani side and in which neither side accepted them as ethnically their own. Comprising up to 5% of the population of Kosovo, their loyalty was bid over in a conflict which tolerated no neutrality. Roma have been the most manipulated population of the long Yugoslav crisis.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |