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Kosovo Roma Make a Dangerous Last Stand - Part II

Jackson Allers - 7/7/2005

Along the way to one of three makeshift Roma refugee camps with an official from the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), remnants of a former Yugoslav mining complex, the Trepca mines, go on for more than two miles, the many slag heaps indicating a past of heavy lead smelting.

As the UN vehicle approaches the Zitkovac camp, two miles from the main mining facilities, Roma children run up to greet yet another set of visitors. Outside traffic to the camps has picked up in recent months, after reports by groups like Refugees International and the Kosovo Ombudsperson accused UNMIK and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) of knowingly setting up the camps on land other UN agencies admit is heavily contaminated from the former mine activity.

At Zitkovac in particular, the World Health Organization reported in 2004 that the lead levels in the blood of the Roma children surpassed anything their instruments could read.

June 12 marked the six-year anniversary of the end of a U.S.-led NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo. The 78-day campaign ended the Serbian crackdown on Kosovo's independence-minded Albanian majority. Now, the Bush administration, through U.S. Undersecretary Nicholas Burns, and UNMIK’s second-in-command and former U.S. Assistant Deputy Secretary of State Larry Rossin, is pushing the UN and the Albanian-led government to return Kosovo’s refugee minority community, or internally displaced persons (IDPs), driven out in reprisal attacks by ethnic Albanians in 1999 and again in ethnically motivated rioting in 2004.

The successful return of IDPs is one major condition placed on Kosovo’s majority Albanian government in order for status talks to begin, presumably later this year. More often than not, “progress” refers to the return of approximately 100,000 Serb IDPs. But, included in this group are the more than 600 Roma living in the three camps established in 1999--Zitkovac, Kablare and Chesminluk.

In May of this year, Burns spoke in front of the House International Relations Committee about the U.S. military position with regards to the resolution of Kosovo’s final status and the eight democratic benchmarks, or “standards,” that Kosovo’s Albanian leaders must fulfill to propel status discussions to the next phase.

“We seek to hasten the day when peace (in Kosovo) is self-sustaining and our troops can come home,” he said. The U.S. has a 99-year lease on a sizeable military base in Kosovo, with U.S. soldiers comprising about 10% of the 18,000 plus NATO peacekeeping force. Burns’ echoed the demands of the so-called Contact Group countries – Britain, France, Italy, Russia and Germany -- and he insisted that Kosovo’s final status must be based on the formation of a multi-ethnic society with full respect for human rights. This, according to Burns, included the right of all refugees and displaced persons to return to their homes safely.

But, as one local analyst put it, multi-ethnicity and refugee returns do not apply to the Roma. Indeed, there is little evidence of a commitment to returning the Roma of Zitkovac to their homes.

Walking through Zitkovac, containers that were supposed to serve as temporary shelters have melded into a shantytown, taking on a feeling of permanence, even though the agency that built the camp, UNHCR, admits it was not meant to exist for more than 90 days. As Refugees International stated in June, the camps were “never intended to become semi-permanent settlements in the midst of an environmental disaster area.”

The 200 Roma living in Zitkovac represent a portion of the more than 8,000 Roma burned out of their “Mahalla,” or community, in the nearby city of Mitrovica as Serb security forces pulled out in June 1999. Local residents say that the 150-year-old settlement on the banks of the Ibar River -- which separates the Serb-dominated northern part of Mitrovica and the southern, Albanian-dominated part -- was burned by Albanians who viewed the Roma as “Serb collaborators.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one former UN official who worked with non-governmental organizations and the municipal government of Mitrovica to find a proper solution said that, without recent media attention, the Roma refugees in Zitkovac would simply be a casualty of the returns process.

Habibi Hajnini agrees with this assessment. Hajnini is the elected leader of the Roma group living in Zitkovac. After six years of living amidst open sewage, and using rigged up electricity from nearby electrical lines, he says there has been little contact with international or Albanian officials about returning to the Mahalla.

“We heard there was an agreement with the municipal president of Mitrovica, Fajk Spahia, and the international community regarding the plan for a return to the Roma Mahalla,” Hajnini said in late May.

The plan Hajnini refers to is one worked out by UNMIK’s Office of Returns and Communities, UNHCR, various NGOs and the Albanian-led municipality, which would restore a portion of the burnt remains of the Mahalla.

But as Hajnini puts it, “We were not present when they signed this agreement, and we actually didn’t know about it until afterwards, and we still don’t know what this plan is all about.” He adds, “What we are worried about is that they plan to return only the 600 people living in these camps. We represent only a fraction of the 8,000 people of the original Mahalla – our community.”

The European Roma Rights Centre in Budapest, Hungary, has initiated a lawsuit against UNMIK for its complicity in the poisoning of the Roma in Zitkovac. As early as November 2000, UNMIK released a report called, “First Phase of Public Health Project on Lead Pollution in Mitrovica Region,” recommending the immediate relocation of the three Roma camps. It also called for a continuous education program and financial support for the eradication of lead poisoning.

UN mission head Soren Jessen-Petersen spoke about the situation during a visit to northern Kosovo. Local and international authorities share the blame, Jessen-Petersen said, but he also blamed the Roma for being a “particularly difficult group” in negotiating their extraction from the contaminated site.

When asked why UNMIK failed to act on its own recommendations to move the camps in 2000, UNMIK spokesperson Neeraj Singh said, “Despite all of our appeals to the Roma to actually move out of there, they have very unequivocally stated that they would only return to the Roma Mahalla.”

Kosovo’s top legal watchdog in the province, the Polish human rights attorney and Kosovo Ombudsperson, Marek Antoni Nowicki, said that the Roma were aware of the health risks to their families, but he said, “In their understanding, in order to have a chance to go back to their point of origin - in this case, the Mahalla, which is their international right as refugees – and, in order to keep this Mahalla question on a proper level politically, they feel they have to make a stand.”

A conference to raise money to rebuild the Mahalla was organized for the first time in April. Again, representatives of the Mahalla were not invited to attend. Complicating matters, the German government has made arrangements with the UN and local Kosovo authorities to forcibly return over 10,000 of the Roma community who sought asylum there after the Kosovo conflict in 1999.

The only problem, according to UN sources, is that there are few municipalities who will accept the Roma population.

In his visit to Kosovo in June, Undersecretary of State Burns said that status discussions should take place later this year if the Kosovo leadership continues its progress toward building a multi-ethnic Kosovo. “It is very important that the Kosovo Albanian majority stand clearly up and say that people who left Kosovo for whatever reasons have the right to come back here,” he said, adding, “that sense of tolerance has to be at the heart of any political settlement in Kosovo.”

Meanwhile, children in the Zitkovac continue to get sick, and according to the former UN official who spoke on condition of anonymity, the best thing for the 150-year-old Gypsy community is to leave Kosovo altogether. “The problem is no country is willing to accept this group of people.”