Deyan Kiuranov - Vendetta on the non-existent: of Kosovo Roma in and out of the international media

07 December 1999

So far there have been three distinct stages in the attitude of the international media towards Kosovo Roma. During stage one, from infinity - and the beginning of the NATO war against Yugoslavia until the end of June of this year - Kosovo Roma did not exist. Stage two that followed was somewhat briefer and lasted for about two months. During that stage, Kosovo Roma began to exist and their problem was that, along with Kosovo Serbs, they were victims to a mass Albanian vendetta, a fact unfortunate, but apparently understandable to specialists. With the end of the summer news-lull, the Kosovo Roma ceased to exist again, possibly for a new infinity. So, if a follower of the international media is to recall today something tying the word “Roma” to the word “Kosovo”, the best s/he could reasonably be expected to arrive at would be a memory of a vendetta carried out against one very short-lived media entity.

The general reasons for this can, in the last resort, all be traced back to racism. The particular ones in the case in point can not; or, if we still insist on calling their motive force “racism”, it would be a racism untypical. There is a paradox here: the particular plight of Roma in Kosovo was misrepresented not due to Western prejudices against Roma in particular; it was misrepresented due to general Western prejudices against the people and the situation in the Balkans as a whole.

Initially, the international media packaged NATO’s attack on Yugoslavia as an armed humanitarian intervention on behalf of an oppressed minority. This attitude would suggest a heightened interest in everything local that had to do with human rights violations, especially related to ethnicity. Nothing of the sort occurred. The “ethnic’ interest went only as far as covering the cleansing of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. This act was perpetrated by the “enemy” and justified the intervention. Any other ethnic issue, no matter how important it would be locally and how many lives were involved, was systematically disregarded, apparently with the aim of not muddling in the public mind the clear case for intervention. That is why in the first stage, despite the fact that there were thousands of Kosovo Roma among the other Kosovar refugees, the media did not notice their presence in the convoys and the camps. Their presence would only have complicated an issue made media-simple.

In this, the international media stopped being public informers and embraced the role of public indoctrinators. Initially this change was subtle and seemed slight and harmless enough: the cleansed Roma were being amalgamated with other victims of the Serbs, and the fact that they were not being distinguished ethnically from other victims of the Serbs appeared negligible in the general picture of the war. However, with the end of the war, the international press looked as if it were forced into a blatant lack of objectivity and wilful misrepresentation of the situation of the Roma, as a result of its own inertia of indoctrination. In a bizarre way, these developments in their simplicity resemble a medieval moralité: a small initial false step ultimately brings total moral downfall.

The media had the war matter cut into two simple lumps: us and them, the good guys and the enemy. As long as the Kosovo Roma were victims of the enemy, they were associated with “us”, but, as mentioned, it was expedient not to recognize them as a separate entity within the mass of “Albanian” refugees. Then the first clashes between Kosovo Albanians and Kosovo Roma took place in the common camps and had to be reported. How should that newly sprung entity, the Kosovo Roma, be cast for the convenience of the public? They were nobodies who were having trouble with the Kosovo Albanians, the people that “we” were there to defend. And these people were gallantly returning the gesture: by forming an active military arm, the KLA, they had become our allies in war. At this point the logic of war totally replaced the logic of human rights, or even basic professional and human decency. It was to be “a foe of a friend is a foe”.

Seeing the Kosovo Albanians now as an ally in war rather than as victims in need of protection, the press, following the lead of the warring coalition, treated them as “more equal” in human rights terms than the Kosovo Roma. Ultimately, the international media assumed the attitude that it was not all right for Serbs to violate the human rights of Kosovo Albanians, but it was all right for Albanians to violate the human rights of Kosovo Roma. When Albanians began to signal, through a wave of vicious attacks, that Serbs and Roma were not welcome in the new Kosovo, international authorities acquiesced. They had become dependent on their new ally in Kosovo.

Still, the process had to be made presentable to the public. Systematic crimes against non-Albanians in Kosovo could not go unmentioned forever. Therefore they had to be explained away. So the media executed an about-turn and became all of a sudden very ethnically conscious. Obscure ethnic idiosyncrasies replaced the clear military and political reasoning. The object was to look for the original causes, the “reasons” for Albanian abuses of Roma. What emerged was a picture of a strange breed of people, the Kosovo Albanians. They apparently differ from other people by not having moral sense nor being answerable to international law, but this is trivial. What isn't trivial is their hatred for Kosovo Roma as a result of the latter’s alleged responsibility, along with Kosovo Serbs, for crimes against Kosovo Albanians. The international media effectively agreed with this collective accusation. They portrayed what the Albanians were doing to the Roma not as a crime, but as a punishment.

Let’s look at just one example. It comes from an article deliberately chosen, for it is one of few articles in the international media which in its general tone is sympathetic to the Roma of Kosovo (Time Magazine, August 2, 1999); it is also uncharacteristically balanced, for we can find quoted there, besides the ubiquitous accusations by Kosovo Albanians, also denials by Roma of their being implicated in atrocities. Yet even this story concludes: “Despite the end of the war, Kosovo remains divided by ethnic violence, its Roma population the latest victims of a seemingly endless cycle of aggression and retribution.” The reader is led to believe that, after having been the aggressors, the Roma are now compelled to pay the price of retribution for their crimes; it is part of a process, poetically described as an “endless cycle”, which, the reader is supposed to understand, no Western presence could dream of ending.

Beside such simplistic suggestions of “cycles” and “backswings”, for the more “scholarly” reader there was the background knowledge that Albanians have in their culture a tradition of collective revenge inherited from their exotic history. The public was supposed to picture this “historic revenge” as poetic justice of the “eye for an eye” type. And all these “soft data” were packaged in the message “This is the Balkans. In the Balkans, as we know, they are happy if they get even that type of justice; in fact, they are not happy with any other type. We should let them have it, lest they misbehave further.” This is not orthodox racism, but it is a way of thinking based on racist stereotypes. And its manifestation in the media points that it is probably widely shared by the supposedly enlightened international community. Said community is hereby invited to condescend and “understand” those poor uncivilized Albanians who know no better. As to the Roma, they made their appearance in the media cast as the guilty victims. In response to concern over the violation of rights of Roma during the occupation, the ERRC time and again drew only one reaction from international journalists: “Is it true that Roma collaborated with Serbs?” Human rights organizations were not present in Kosovo during the war and could not have collected such evidence. But they were present during the occupation and were offering the media testimonies of freshly perpetrated atrocities by Albanians against the Roma. This information has been systematically disregarded.

Thus we come to stage three, when the Kosovo Roma vanish again from the news. The reason is not that killings, abductions, rape, arson and forced eviction of Roma have stopped in Kosovo. On the contrary: the reason for lack of reporting is that everything continues, on a slowly diminishing scale, as less and less Roma are left in Kosovo. Monotonous and repetitive news of continuing killings and arson is evidently regarded as news of inferior quality. It is doubtful that the Kosovo Roma would ever be heard about worldwide.

This might be just too bad: the international media might be missing their chance of informing the world of the deep and sincere gratitude of the Kosovo Roma. They are today people who still live, displaced and in danger, in their native Kosovo, or try to shelter in an improvised foreign camp with no bright prospects. But they should doubtless see their own plight from the viewpoint of the international media, and thank the international community for liberating them from the oppressive regime of Mr Milošević. We must admit that the international community has achieved this feat in a rather revolutionary, even Marxian manner: the oppressed were “freed”, besides Milošević, from such bourgeois fetters as their private property (houses, tractors, cars, clothes, money), as well as occasionally their lives, and in all cases their human dignity and their internationally sanctified human rights. No problem: there would be experts ready with the opinion that “the best of Marx” has become absorbed in the Western cultural tradition.