Roma and Conflict: a short intro to the new issue of Roma Rights
18 May 2017
“Everyone regularly emphasizes only the suffering of the Bosniaks, the Serbs or the Croats. No one speaks about the Roma. What are we? Animals? Well, we too suffered, just like all the others. We are only asking for someone to take responsibility.”
Zijo Ribić, sole survivor of 1992 massacre of Roma in Skočić
The issue of responsibility looms large in this latest issue of Roma Rights, which examines the impact of conflict on marginalized Romani populations, viewed by combatants in times of war with a mixture of ambivalence and contempt, and deemed to be communities of little consequence in the peace-building processes that follow the conclusion of hostilities.
This issue takes a look at the fate of Roma during and after conflicts. Some times they have been the direct targets of murderous aggression; other times they have been subject to reprisals, variously accused of non-participation, or collaboration with the enemy. Then there have been the many times where individual Roma actively took a side, fighting as anti-fascist partisans in Word War Two, defending the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, as street fighters taking on the Soviets in the 1956 Revolution in Hungary, or as in the case of Irish Travellers who were among the Irish Volunteers who staged the 1916 Easter Rebellion against British rule. Too often, the roles played by Roma, Travellers and other minorities were elided from the dominant national narratives that followed.
The fate of the Roma during and after the last round of Balkan wars is the focus of four articles in this latest issue. 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. 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.
Because their wartime suffering was deemed to be of little consequence and often written off as “collateral damage”, the social exclusion of Roma continued in peacetime. The lack of official recognition of Roma, either as victims or as participants in wartime, meant that there could be great hatred but little room for them in the imagined communities of the newly-minted nation states that emerged in the 1990s out of the ruins of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
The legacy of the wars in former Yugoslavia still reverberates. In April 2016, the UN Human Rights Advisory Panel called on UNMIK to publicly acknowledge its abject failure to comply with applicable human rights standards and apologise to Roma, Askali and Balkan Egyptian IDPs placed in lead contaminated camps, and to compensate victims for material and moral damage. The Panel deemed the living conditions in the camps to be “sub-standard”, “particularly distressing”, and “appalling”; and slammed UNMIK’s claims in mitigation as “discriminatory and debasing.” The Panel dismissed claims by UNMIK that the health crisis in the camps was attributable to the unhealthy lifestyle of Roma IDPs as “tainted by racial prejudice”, contradicted by scientific evidence, “and certainly not objective or reasonable justification.” Justice has been delayed for so long, but delivery is not yet complete. The ERRC recently submitted more than 10,000 signatures to the UN Secretary General, calling on UNMIK to issue a full public apology, and pay compensation to the victims and their families to cover the human rights violations, moral damage, and medical costs they have incurred.
Beyond the Mitrovice case, more than fifteen years after the final Balkan war, across the republics of the former Yugoslavia many thousands of Roma lack basic documentation, remain displaced, their status uncertain and unresolved. Non-persons in the eyes of the authorities, many are effectively deprived of the very basic right to have rights. For those Roma who fled abroad as refugees to Western Europe, the virus of antigypsyism ensured that Romani asylum claims were met with scepticism and suspicion by various authorities.
Neither was there much public sympathy for the suffering and privations of Romani refugees – for many, they 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.
The theme of “normalised absence” surfaces in all the contributions, whether it’s Roma as active participants and a people “with politics”; or Roma as victims, caught “between two fires” in the Balkan wars that ripped Yugoslavia asunder; be it the fate of Domari refugees fleeing conflict in Syria; or the ambivalence that characterises attitudes to Roma in the aftermath of very different conflicts from civil-war Spain, to those stranded in a kind of legal limbo in the breakaway region of Abkhazia (where de jure enforcement of international commitments towards human rights’ protection falls under the jurisdiction of Georgia, in a breakaway region where it has no de facto control).
As long as Europe’s largest ethnic minority continue to be written out and rendered invisible in the histories of Europe’s wars and conflicts; and excluded from the politics of reconstruction and making peace, this continent’s self-understanding will remain fatally flawed. This misrecognition comes with practical and often fatal consequences, as is made clear by the flourishing of a politics of antigypsyism in 21st Century Europe.
To reverse the politics of hate, and to get beyond the racism which underpins those normalised absences, Thomas Hammarberg proposed that truth commissions be established in a number of European countries to give full account and recognition of the crimes committed against Romani people. In 2015, the Swedish government produced its version, The Dark Unknown History: White Paper on Abuses and Rights Violations Against Roma in the 20th Century. This offers a practical example of a necessary first step, for Europe badly needs a deeper understanding of what Roma have faced, and continue to face, both in times of war and peace. And Roma in 21st Century Europe deserve by right, a future beyond fear, one that is structured by hope not hate.
(This is excerpted from the introduction to Roma Rights 1 2017).
