The war in Kosovo is not over. Since June 18th the KLA and their Albanian supporters have terrorizing the Kosovar Rom in an ethnic cleansing operation that has destroyed more than 20,000 Rom homes.
In many villages and towns, all Roma homes have been destroyed. Families whose Roma ancestors arrived here as early as 1320, or Hashkalija whose oral traditions recount an even older history, have not only been made homeless, but over 150,000 have had to flee to other countries.
In order to justify these attacks, the KLA and their supports have labeled "all" Rom and Hashkalija as having collaborated with the Serbs. Yet the evidence on the ground does not support this allegation. Although KFOR and the UN police have received many requests to detain Serbs suspected of atrocities during the war, no Roma or Hashkalija has been mentioned in reports.
The ethnic Albanians dislike of Rom/Hashkalija goes back many years before the war. When the Albanians first started to demonstrate back in 1969 against Serb rule in Kosovo, the Rom/Hashkalija refused to join this demonstration. While the Albanians wanted independence, the Rom/Hashkalija were still too far down the economic scale to think of that luxury. All they wanted were jobs and education. When they finally achieved those two things under Tito, they were so grateful they thought they were being patriotic Yugoslavians by not taking to the street. The Albanians have resented the Roma/Hashkalija ever since.
Although over 70% of Roma/Hashkalija had high educational degrees and most of them held good jobs during the years preceding the war, the Albanians today try to drag up the old stereotypes: lazy, dirty, worthless, homeless.
Today about 40,000 Roma/Hashkalija are homeless, but only because they’re home has been burned since the arrival of KFOR. The typical operation for cleansing a neighborhood of Roma has been for a couple of local KLA soldiers to accompany several Albanians to a Roma home and then threaten the occupants with death if they were still living there the next day. Usually the Roma occupants didn’t wait, but left immediately, many wearing only their pajamas. Their homes were then burned. If the home was in a good area, the rubble was soon bulldozed away and a new home built on the site for a local high-ranking Albanian official.
Ironically, Roma who refused to give in to these threats and who did not leave their homes usually were not attacked, and their home was not burned----until now.
Now, today, with the disbanding of the KLA, a new wave of attacks is taking place and Roma homes not destroyed in the first wave are being burned.
The attacks are against all Roma and Hashkalija. No one is spared. Not the retired, not the invalids, not the blind who of course could not be labeled collaborators.
Although over 150,000 Roma and Hashkalija have fled Kosovo, their ancestral homeland for the past seven hundred years, there are still 40,000 trying desperately to stay. But despite the UN’s declaration of preparing a multi-ethnic society and the claim of NATO and KFOR to protect everyone, the results only point to a policy of genocide---- genocide of the Roma and Hashkaija today in Kosovo.
Roma today in Kosovo can not venture outside their own village without being kidnapped or killed. Roma today in Kosovo are always turned down by Albanian hospitals. Roma today in Kosovo can not attend Albanian schools. Roma today in Kosovo have lost their jobs.
But perhaps worst of all, Rom today in Kosovo are being discriminated against by the major aid agencies that are mainly run by local Albanians. Since the war, over 90% of all Rom/Hashkalija communities have been refused aid by agencies such as Mother Teresa, and ironically by Islamic Relief, although all Roma and Hashkalija remaining in Kosovo today are Muslim. Even an international aid agency with a renowned reputation such as Oxfam has not escaped this discrimination being practiced by its own local Albanians in Pristine.
But perhaps the worst offender of all is UNHCR. Their policy towards the Roma they should be looking after can best be described by an incident that happened a few weeks ago when UNHCR was asked how they were preparing one of their displaced persons camps for the winter. At a meeting attended by KFOR and Oxfam, the UNHCR director of the Rom camp in question said: "We have no plans for them this winter. We just hope they will disappear."
And disappearing they were until Macedonia closed their borders to Roma and Hashkalija seeking to survive the draconian measures of UNHCR in Kosovo.
At the main UNHCR displaced person’s camp in Kosovo, just outside Pristine, there have been four recorded deaths in the past few weeks only because the UN police and the camp management refused to take sick Roma children to hospital at night. In one incident, at 1:30 in the morning, a UN policemen refused to take a pregnant woman to hospital although her water had already broke and she was having contractions every two minutes. He told the aid agency worker who was on night duty that; "the gypsies have a tractor in camp. They can take her on the tractor."
When local Albanians see the discrimination perpetrated by international aid agencies and the UN organizations, why should the Roma be respected those who won the war.
The war in Kosovo is supposedly over. But this winter more Roma and Hashkalija may die than all the Serbs and Albanians during the war.
That is the situation today in Kosovo.