"There is chaos in Kosovo..."

11 July 2000

...said Jiri Dienstbier, the United Nations special human rights investigator for former Yugoslavia, on March 21, 2000, after a ten-day visit to the province, according to Reuters. An update on the continuing violence against Roma in Kosovo in the second quarter of 2000 follows:

 

• The multinational Kosovo Force (KFOR) reported on July 3 that on July 2, unknown persons threw a hand granade into the yard of a Romani house in the village of Ĺ timlje.
• In the early morning of June 23, 2000, in a Roma settlement north of Peć, unknown attackers, fired shots and threw three hand grenades at a Romani house; according to the KFOR report of the same day, there were no casualties.
• A house in the Romani quarter of Orahovac was attacked with a rocket on the night of June 12, as reported by the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) Police. The explosion damaged the house, but no injuries were reported.
• Among the 3368 persons unaccounted for in the province of Kosovo, more than 100 are Roma, the International Committee of the Red Cross announced in their June 7 appeal for news on missing persons in Kosovo, as quoted by the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on June 9.
• In Obilić, a Romani house was set on fire on June 9, according to UNMIK Police.
• Four unknown masked men armed with an AK-47 approached a Romani man and demanded his money on the late evening of June 7 in Djakovica, UNMIK Police reported.
• Unknown perpetrators set an abandoned Romani house on fire in Prizren on June 2; according to a KFOR report on June 3, this was not the first time that this particular house had been set ablaze.
• In their "Update on the Situation of Ethnic Minorities in Kosovo" of May 31, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) reported twenty cases of arson, two cases of aggravated assault, and seven cases of murder of Roma in the period between January 30 and May 27.
• An unoccupied Romani house was set on fire in Orašje on May 25. UNMIK Police, who reported this incident, identified three possible Albanian male suspects.
• Five Roma and thirty-one Serbs detained in the county prison in Kosovska Mitrovica ended their forty-two-day hunger strike on May 21, according to the Prague-based Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty report on May 23. The prisoners were striking to demand that they be tried by non-Albanian judges. On the next day, UNMIK announced the appointment of international judicial boards for six trials involving the strikers, respecting the detainees' requests to be tried by judges from former Yugoslav republics, familiar with the Serbian language and Yugoslav laws, reported the Kosovo Daily News from Dečani.
• An unidentified masked person beat a Romani man and threatend to kill him, in the village of Trebović on May 17, according to UNMIK Police.
• The same source reported that on the same day, in Klina, three armed unidentified persons threatened a Romani woman to stop sending her children to school.
• An abandoned Romani house was set on fire in the Romani quarter in Orahovac on May 13, reported UNMIK Police.
• On May 6, an abandoned Romani house was set on fire in Uroševac, according to UNMIK Police.
• According to a KFOR report on April 28, Ms Hadžije Aguši, a seventy-four-year-old Romani woman was seriously injured in a grenade attack in Gnjilane on the evening of April 27. On May 2, the Yugoslav state news agency TANJUG reported that Ms Aguši died in the Priština hospital.
• On April 24, three unidentified males threatened a Romani woman in Domorovce with bodily harm if she and her family did not move from the village.
• KFOR reported on April 23 that nine explosions occurred on the evening of April 22 near Goraždevac, leaving six craters near a group of Romani houses.
• On the evening of April 13, according to UNMIK Police, four armed men, who presented themselves as members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), took a Romani man out of his house in Prizren, and drove him out of town. There they beat him, questioned him about his involvement in the military conflict in Kosovo, and told him to provide information on Roma who collaborated with the Serbs.
• Two unidentified men shot dead a forty-two-year-old Romani man in the market of Peć on April 15, KFOR reported on April 19.
• On April 11, a Romani woman reported to UNMIK Police that unidentified men shot several shots outside her house, and threw a grenade at it. There were no injuries.
• According to UNMIK Police, two Romani houses were set on fire on April 10 in Uroševac.
• The United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) noted an increase in the number of murders during the second week in April, noting that there were four Roma among ten victims of violent killings, according to Reuters on April 10. Agence France-Presse (AFP) specified that attacks on Roma included the murders of two Romani boys aged seventeen and eighteen, and a forty-eight-year-old Romani woman in Peć, who were killed by local members of the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC), the local civilian security force, according to UNMIK.
• UNMIK Police reported the murder of a Romani person in an unspecified location in the week preceding April 3.
• A Romani man was found strangled to death in the town of Istok on March 27, according to the UNHCR-OSCE update.
• Unknown individuals threw a grenade into the yard of a Romani house on March 20, KFOR reported on March 22, without specifying the location.
• Ethnic Albanians set fire to a Romani house in Orahovac on March 20, TANJUG reported on March 22.

(AFP, KFOR, Kosovo Daily News, OSCE, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Reuters, TANJUG, UNHCR, UNMIK)