25 years after Yugoslavia: Roma refugees and IDPs (part 2)
22 August 2016
“There were mass killings of Roma - it made no difference whether they were men or women. The Roma were targeted because it was believed that they had money in cash and gold.”
(ERRC witness interviews with Bosnian refugees 1996)
In a recent reminder of a painful legacy of the Balkan wars, a Catholic church in the German town of Regensburg in Germany was accused of ‘starving out’ four families of Roma refugees that had taken shelter there. The church, in an attempt to force the families out, stopped providing food, barred citizens from bringing in provisions, and filed trespassing charges against the Roma.
Protesters gather in Berlin against laws that restrict asylum seekers from Western Balkans nations [Yermi Brenner/Al Jazeera]
On Monday 8 August, faced with a strong police presence, the families left voluntarily. A church spokesman said that they "wanted to stay in Germany forever,” but that this was “a question for the Government not the Catholic Church."
Earlier in June 2016, one hundred protesting Roma faced down police in Berlin when they occupied the memorial for Roma and Sinti victims of the Nazi Holocaust. The protest was in response to recent changes to German asylum laws (adding Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro to its ‘safe countries’ list) and stepping up deportations of asylum applicants from the Western Balkans. Deportations have tripled since the changes, and three quarters of the 20,888 deported from Germany in 2015 were to the Western Balkans.
April brought another reminder of the Balkan wars when a UN Human Rights Advisory Panel condemned UNMIK for leaving Roma families exposed to lead poisoning in camps for the internally displaced in Kosovo. Special Rapporteur on minority issues, Rita Izsák-Ndiaye called for a public apology and compensation to be paid to the victims, and added, “I am glad that justice is being now delivered to one of the most deprived communities who had to suffer conflict, displacement and negligence.”
Official negligence combined with ambivalence and indifference characterized the response of the international community to the suffering of Roma during the bloody conflicts that shred Yugoslavia at the end of the last century.
The recent call by the European Commission for Member States to adopt a ‘balanced approach’ to addressing the needs of newly arrived refugees and vulnerable Roma communities is timely; but on current form likely to go utterly unheeded. It also overlooks the fact that tens of thousands of Roma across Europe were in fact refugees; fleeing from bloody conflicts they had no hand in waging.
Caught between warring factions, the Roma were often vilified as traitors and communities were left dangerously exposed as battle frontlines shifted back and forth. Anti-Roma prejudice ensured that despite being refugees fleeing war, Romani asylum claims were met with scepticism and suspicion by various authorities. Neither was there much public sympathy for their suffering and privations – for many, the refugee Roma were just bogus economic migrants, nomads on the move and on the make. And as long as such narratives prevail, the persecution of Roma that closed the 20th Century is in danger of being wiped from public memory; and with it any understanding of the impact of forced migration on so many Romani lives.
For who remembers the massacre of Roma in Zvornik in 1992? The town on the river Drina was seized by Serb paramilitaries in May of that year. A full twenty one years later, a Belgrade court sentenced seven members of the ‘Sima’s Chetniks’ paramilitary unit to a total of 73 years in prison for mass killing, rape and torture, and demolition of a mosque. Presiding judge Rastko Popovic said that in 1992, the defendants killed 27 Roma civilians in the neighbourhood of Skocic, threw them into a pit and then set off a hand grenade. The other civilian was killed in a village yard. The dead included pregnant women, and children aged from two to 12 years old.
Who remembers the 36 Romani lives lost on the Adriatic Sea on 20th August 1999? The refugees from Kosovo were being smuggled into Italy when their ship sank; 69 Roma were rescued from the sea. A month earlier Italian authorities announced that they would not recognize persons fleeing Yugoslavia as refugees, but would instead treat them as illegal immigrants. The Interior Ministry stated that it did not accept that the lives of Roma are at risk in Kosovo.
Back in 1996, the ERRC in an open letter [BR8] to the German government protested at plans announced by three regional interior ministries to begin deportation and repatriation of Romani individuals to Bosnia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). The ERRC claimed that none of the new states had demonstrated a willingness to accept returned Roma, and presented evidence that, as in the case of Banja Luka, Roma were systematically subjected to ethnic cleansing; and that at least 500 Roma were killed in the towns of Zvornik, Bihać and Sarajevo: “The victimization of Roma during the war in Bosnia has yet to be acknowledged by the international community.”
The ERRC expressed its concern in April 1997 at the growing number of deportations, and the vulnerability of Bosnian refugees who only granted the weak status of ‘tolerated’ (Duldung) - in legal terms only a stop on deportation. Furthermore, deportations were carried out “in a manner both insensitive to the needs of the refugees and inconsistent with government regulations.” Typical of this was a Berlin court ruling in April 1998 that three Bosnian Roma be deported, even though the court acknowledged that they could not return to their native town in Republika Srpska, which had been ‘ethnically cleansed’. The court reasoned that the refugees could successfully return to the other Bosnian entity, the Muslim-Croat Federation, without fearing physical harm.
As to what happened to returning refugees and internally displaced Bosnian Roma, the ERRC reported in 2000 that many found their homes destroyed or occupied by Serbs, and the authorities unwilling to assist them. Among the returnees who spoke to the ERRC was Ms Halida Džafić, who returned from Germany to the Serb-administered town of Modriča in 1996, to find that the plot of land she owned, on which she had earlier begun to build a house, had been taken over by displaced ethnic Serbs. "The first time we returned to see what state our property was in, these people hurled stones at us and chased us away. They did not let us go anywhere close to it." Only in 1999 did she obtain documents that proved ownership, by then they had no money to build the house. While there were possibilities for returnees to receive aid in the form of building materials, none was forthcoming for the Džafić family.
Eight years after they were forced to flee, the Muratović family returned to Modrički Lug to find their family house emptied of its contents, stripped of its roof, doors and windows. They complained to the ERRC that the women of the family dared not leave their houses for fear of attack; they were verbally abused on ethnic and religious grounds by local Serbs on a daily basis; and were left without water or electricity.
The debates that raged around deportations of Roma asylum seekers in the 1990s have not gone away; neither has the political imperative to ‘return’ as many as possible to countries where, as the recent ERRC overview makes clear, Roma returnees will likely experience discrimination and deprivation. In response to the Regensburg situation, spokesman for UNHCR-Germany, Martin Rentsch, told Al Jazeera "Depending on the individual case, we think that the social, economic and cultural disadvantage of Roma people in some Western Balkan societies can be a form of persecution under the UN Refugee Convention."
Twenty-five years after the collapse of Yugoslavia, it is clear that Roma who sought international protection due to anticipation of serious harm in their country of origin often did not get it; and that many Roma were simply denied access to a fair and open procedure in which to have their claims heard. Caught between warring groups with no foreign power or military alliance to champion their claims, the Roma found themselves displaced and despised, their wartime sufferings unrecognized, and declaimed where’er they went as bogus refugees, nomads and ‘mere’ economic migrants.
In the midst of the current so-called ‘refugee crisis’, the European Commission has called for a “balanced approach, reconciling all integration needs.” A balanced approach requires recognition of the role played by armed conflict in the recent past, and discrimination in the present in forcing many thousands of Roma to migrate from their countries of origin.
The European Commission rightly noted that anti-Gypsyism is on the rise and directly related to increased radicalisation and extremism across Europe. In calling on public authorities to distance themselves from racist and xenophobic discourse targeting Roma, the Commission reminded such authorities that a reluctance to act is in itself an act of complicity with the forces of intolerance in our societies. And there is far too much complicity afoot in these dark days.
(The fate of Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian communities from Kosovo in the final Balkan war will be the subject of the third article in this series.)
