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CounterPunch
October
15, 2002
The Roma and
"Humanitarian" Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo
by SANI RIFATI
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.)
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?
Sani 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.
He can be reached at: staff@voiceofroma.org
This article originally appeared in Dissident Voice.
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
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