TRANSITIONS ONLINE: Kosovo's Roma: Two-Faced
In the conflict between Kosovo’s Serbs and Albanians, Roma negotiate the tricky in-between.
Saffet Ramic has learned to travel with a screwdriver since the war.
On a dusty back street in Mitrovica, Ramic pulls his van to the side of the road. He gets out and fishes the screwdriver from his right pocket. Then he slides off the license plates with their Kosovo registration tags, throws them inside and climbs back in.
“It’s so the Serbs don’t kill us,” he says matter-of-factly. It’s permissible to drive without plates in this part of the city since Kosovo tags are not accepted here. Several blocks later as the van chugs again into ethnic Albanian territory, he reattaches the plates.
“It’s so the Albanians don’t kill us,” Ramic, 30, chuckles, his bronze- colored skin revealing that he is neither ethnic Albanian nor Serb, but one of approximately 30,000 Roma, sometimes referred to as “Gypsies,” who are part of Kosovo’s population of 2 million.
In a region where ethnic tensions fester eight years after the conflict between Serbian forces and Kosovo Albanians, Ramic navigates between two clearly defined worlds, although he fits in neither. Like the license plates he slides on and off, Ramic’s identity shifts with necessity and convenience.
More than 150,000 Roma were caught in the 1998–1999 war, when many were targeted by ethnic Albanian forces who considered them Serb collaborators, while the Serbian army routed Roma from Kosovo Albanian villages. Thousands moved to temporary camps and still live there. More than 120,000 fled the country before eventual NATO intervention, Serbian defeat, and the establishment of a UN protectorate in Kosovo.
