The Roma and “Humanitarian” Ethnic Cleansing
in Kosovo
by Śani
Rifati
Dissident
Voice
October 13, 2002
I am a Rom (more commonly known as “Gypsy”) who was born in
Kosovo, Yugoslavia, and lived in Pristina (the capital of the Kosovo region)
for 27 years. In the summer of 2000, ten years later, I was only 30 miles away
in Macedonia but I could not visit the town where I lived most of my life. This was more than three years after the
“humanitarian bombing” by U.S.-NATO forces and escalation of ethnic conflict
began in Kosovo on March 24th, 1999.
But it was still too dangerous for me, as a dark-skinned “Madjupi”
(Albanian term connoting “lower than garbage”), to set foot inside of Kosovo.
Finally, the day arrived (May 2nd, 2002) when I could visit
my place of birth, the place of so many memories from my youth. But that
place--where I grew up with my four brothers and one sister, cousins,
relatives, neighbors, friends--no longer existed. Everything had been wiped
away. The new and renovated houses, villas, gas stations, motels, all built in
the past three years by the triumphant ethnic Albanians, made Kosovo look like
a foreign country to me. I didn’t know
what to feel in that moment of returning.
Fear, happiness, anger, sadness?
The paradox that crossed my mind was that all this rebuilding is being sponsored by international relief agencies and financed by development and investment companies with such well-known heads as Dick Cheney and George Soros. Meanwhile the Roma, Serbs, Gorani, Bosnians, Turks and other minorities in Kosovo are starving! While most of these international institutions were bragging about “free and democratic Kosovo,” these peoples were forced to abandon their homes, suffering a “humanitarian” supported ethnic cleansing that has been virtually invisible to the rest of the world. The ironic consequence of NATO/US rescue of oppressed Albanians is that they then became oppressors themselves.
This May, as President of Voice of Roma
(VOR), I led a trip to Kosovo with delegates representing human rights, refugee
assistance, and peace groups from the U.S., Germany, Italy, and Holland. Most
people working in such organizations think that Kosovo is free now, and that
its people are living in harmony and peace. They are surprised when I inform
them that the ethnic minorities in Kosovo are still fleeing. I wanted them to
witness with their own eyes what is going on there.
The delegates were housed in the Romani communities, south
of Pristina. Each family hosted two or more delegates. The delegates spent time
with and got to know people who had been caught in heavy crossfire between
Serbs and Albanians, suffered from the heavy bombing by NATO’s U.S.-led forces,
and experienced discrimination by K-FOR forces, the U.N. Police, international
non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and Western European foreign policies.
The delegates were appalled by the stories they heard and shocked at the
conditions under which the Kosovo Roma were living.
Since NATO’s “peace-keepers” arrived in Kosovo, more than
300,000 ethnic minorities have been “cleansed” from the region by extremist
Albanians. It has been more than a year since the U.N. Interim Administration
in Kosovo (UNMIK) or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
(OSCE) released any statements about human rights abuses of minorities in
Kosovo. Surprisingly, such NGOs as Doctors Without Borders (winner of the Nobel
Peace Prize), the International Red Cross, Oxfam, and many more have failed the
ethnic minorities in Kosovo by not addressing their problems. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch
are alone in reporting on minority human rights abuses in Kosovo.
My question is: If NATO’s so-called humanitarian bombing
was to stop “ethnic cleansing,” why are the same Western powers now so
unwilling to intervene on behalf of the actual ethnic cleansing of Romani
people and other minorities in Kosovo?
The ethnic cleansing of the Roma since U.N. peace-keepers
arrived in June 12th of 1999 has resulted in more than 75% of this population
(over 100,000 Romani people) fleeing Kosovo. Still the media and the
international “humanitarian” community are silent. U.S. and Western media did
not catch any of these events on their radar screens, or rather willingly
ignored these horrors. (See our report The Current Plight of the Roma in
Kosovo, available from Voice
of Roma, P.O. Box 514, Sebastopol, CA 95473.)
Crkvena Vodica village just outside the capital Prishtina. 94 Romani
homes were destroyed by Albanians after the 1999 US-NATO bombings.
The majority of the Roma who are left in Kosovo (25,000 out
of a prewar population of 150,000) are internal refugees, but they do not have
the official status of refugees. Instead these Roma are labeled
“internally-displaced persons” (IDPs), with fewer recognized rights than
refugees, and are restricted to camps with very poor facilities. Some Roma do
live in Serbian controlled enclaves. No
other ethnic group is in the IDP camps, only Roma. Why is this? Only the
Roma have no safe haven country. Serbs flee to Serbia, Bosnians to Bosnia,
Turks to Turkey, and Gorani (who are Muslim/Slavs) to Macedonia or Western
Europe.
The poorest of the poor, in the IDP camps, the Roma face a
remarkable level of discrimination and oppression that is threatening their
lives and crippling their culture. Just to give you an idea, the U.N. provides
to each of the Roma in IDP camps a monthly ration of eight kilos (17 pounds) of
flour, two onions, two tomatoes, a half-kilo (one pound) of cheese, and some
fruit (usually rotten). Beyond that, there is only three liters of cooking oil
per family, regardless of family size; no other supplies are available
(interviews with refugees in IDP camps in Kosovo and Macedonia). If these
people are struggling to survive physically, what then happens to their
culture?
For another example, when a U.N. representative was
approached by a VOR representative about providing cooking and drinking water to
Roma in one camp, his reply was, “Oh, the Gypsies know how to take care of
themselves. They’re nomads; they’ve lived all their lives like that.” If the Roma are facing such dismissal from
those on whom they depend for their physical survival, how are they to survive
either physically or culturally?
This deeply-rooted stereotype, that the Roma are
uncivilized wanderers who don’t have the same needs as members of “civilized”
societies is contradicted by the facts.
In Kosovo, Roma have lived in houses for over seven hundred years, and
most of them have never seen a wanderer’s caravan. The effect of such
stereotypes is to dehumanize the Roma and destroy their cultural
infrastructure.
In today’s “free” Kosovo, no Rom can move freely; his
children cannot go to school, and cannot speak their mother tongue. Because
they had to leave their homes and now must stay in the camps, most of the Roma
still in Kosovo have not seen nearby family members in more than three years.
That means, among other things, that marriages cannot be made according to
Romani social rules. What happens to a society in which new families cannot
form?
How can we change the situation of Roma, wherever they may
happen to be? What is our
responsibility to a people who have been so abused and ignored for centuries?
Śani
Rifati is a Romani activist, writer and lecturer from
Kosovo, now living in Graton, California. He is the President of Voice of Roma, a non-profit
advocacy group working on behalf of Roma in Kosovo and Romani refugees living
throughout Europe. Email: staff@voiceofroma.org
Glossary of Terms:
Rom= one person,
(sing.), human being or husband in Romani language.
Roma= Gypsies (pl.)
Romani=Adjective (e.g.
Romani language, history, culture, etc…)
Madjupi= Derogatory
term in Albanian language for Roma.
Gorani= Ethnic group
in Kosovo that are Slav Muslim