Roma and other minorities in Kosovo

10 April 2001

On February 20, 2001, the police of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) reported that four masked and armed men entered the home of a Romani man in the village of Djakovë/Djakovica in eastern Kosovo, and demanded money. However, they found nothing of any value and fled, damaging the man’s car as they left. In a more serious incident, on February 14, UNMIK police reported that they had begun an investigation after the body of a Bosnian Romani man was found at the edge of a road at 5:40 AM in the town of Lipljan, central Kosovo, with a single gunshot wound to the head. A day earlier in the same town, the same source reported that a Romani family were victims of a firebomb attack on their home. At just before 8 PM on February 13, an explosion destroyed one room and the front door, but the family escaped physically unharmed. In a similar attack on February 12, a NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) patrol reported that a hand grenade had been thrown into the backyard of a house occupied by Kosovo Roma in Suharekë/Suva Reka and had detonated; a second such device reportedly found was disposed of in a controlled explosion.

Mr Zecir Rexhepi, a Romani man from Kamenica, Kosovo, reports having been seriously beaten after the mid-1999 deployment of international KFOR forces in his town. In an interview conducted on December 10, 2000, in Kamenica, Mr Rexhepi told the ERRC that, considering it unsafe to stay in his house throughout the NATO bombing, Mr Rexhepi and his family had been living with friends. In order to prevent his home from being occupied, however, Mr Rexhepi visited the house every day. In June 1999, two days after KFOR arrived, Mr Rexhepi and his cousin went to visit the house. He reports that approximately twenty Kosovar Albanians came to the door, hit them, brought them to another house, forced them to lie on the floor, and continued to beat them and then told them to leave town. The assailants then let Mr Rexhepi and his cousin go. Mr Rexhepi says that he was unable to eat for a week as a result of having been hit in the face repeatedly with the butt of a gun. Mr Rexhepi's house was burned down three days later. Photo: ERRC

According to the Priština-based non-governmental organisation Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms, four Serbian and Roma houses were destroyed in the town of Burim/Jović, south-western Kosovo, in the month of January 2001. In addition it was reported by KFOR that on December 16, a Romani man from the village of Bresje was rushed to hospital following an attack by five unidentified assailants in which he was repeatedly stabbed; KFOR reported on December 16 that his condition was stable and announced an investigation into the incident.

It is estimated that more than two-thirds of the Romani population of Kosovo as it existed before June 1999 — probably more than 100,000 people — have fled since the province came under UN control. Attacks against members of Kosovo’s minority groups led the Head of the UN High Commission for Refugees in Kosovo, Mr Eric Morris, to state on February 19 that “the minority community is being hunted down one by one,” according to Agence France-Presse. Additionally he stated that “extreme members of the society will not rest until the province is ethnically cleansed.” For more information on Roma in the Kosovo crisis, see www.errc.org. 

(Agence France-Presse, Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms, Free B92, Glas javnosti, KFOR, UNHCR, UNMIK)