Germany to Kosovo Roma Refugees: You Must Return

by Una Vera

Published November 03, 2009 @ 05:22PM PT

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Life isn’t easy for Roma anywhere in Europe, but it is about to become much more precarious for thousands of Kosovo Roma refugees living in Germany. Beginning early next year, the German government will start returning thousands of Roma refugees to Kosovo. The governments of the two countries are expected to sign an agreement on refugee returns in a few weeks.

The move has alarmed Germany’s Kosovo Roma refugees.

Perceived to have sided with Kosovo’s politically dominant Serb population during the conflict, Roma were subjected to a wave of ethnic cleansing by the Albanian rebel Kosovo Liberation Army as the tide of the war turned against Serbia in late 1999.

For the past decade, at least ten thousand Kosovo Roma have lived in Germany, many raising children who have never been to Kosovo and speak none of its languages. Still, Germany insists now that Kosovo has been at peace for almost ten years, Roma who do not qualify for permanent residence must return.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which remains involved in resolving issues of long-term displacement in the former Yugoslavia, stated earlier this year that Kosovo was still unstable and living conditions poor. It currently recommends refugees return on a voluntary basis only.

Faced with criticism from the Roma community, refugee rights activists, and the German Left party, the German government has publicly insisted that there will be no mass deportations. The current plan foresees no more than 2,500 returns to Kosovo annually for the next ten years. Stefan Paris, a government spokesperson, said the accord to be signed with the government in Pristina meets all international standards and that all humanitarian factors have been considered.

I find this hard to believe. Either the German government is being disingenuous, or it's really bad at determining if a situation is suitable for refugee returns.

With the intention of writing an article for a European online political affairs magazine, I visited Kosovo in December of 2007, just before diplomatic negotiations on its final status collapsed for the last time. I wanted to see what life in Kosovo’s minority communities was like at that critical moment.

I never did get my story published, but the trip was eye-opening, and I’m glad I made it. In Mitrovica, a divided, flashpoint town near the border with Serbia, I saw hundreds of internally displaced Roma living in old military barracks without access to proper sanitation, electricity or heating.

Children with serious faces and tattered clothes played barefoot on lead-poisoned ground. Standing out against the otherwise gray monochrome of the base, colorful plastic bags, caught and shredded on the camp’s barbwire fence, whipped like small flags. When I sheepishly tried to photograph some of the kids, their parents suddenly appeared from inside the barracks and called the children away from the fence. I got the message. These people had seen countless foreigners with expensive cameras come to photograph their intractable, politically-charged misery, and I had nothing to offer them. I put my camera away.

Kosovo Roma are Europe’s most discriminated against, most impoverished and least socially mobile people. To be Roma in Kosovo is to be unable to walk down the main street of one’s hometown after dark, to always be watching the shadows and listening for footsteps. Public transportation in most parts of the country is still too dangerous for Roma to use. Where their communities are not served by the Humanitarian Minority Bus Transportation system, Roma must walk long distances to reach schools and medical facilities.

Most Kosovo Roma children attend deprived Roma-only schools, and drop out early. In a poor state with few employment opportunities for anyone, jobs for Roma in the formal economy are non-existent. Unemployment among Kosovo Roma is almost a hundred percent, and communities struggle by on remittances from the Roma diaspora in Western Europe and declining handouts from aid agencies.

Before the war, most Roma lived in modest but modern and dignified homes. During the war, nearly all those homes were destroyed or occupied after their owners fled. Thanks to an international task force on property law, some Roma have been able to reclaim their lost homes. Most, however, have not. Construction of returnee neighborhoods, financed by the European Commission and national donor agencies, has proceeded slowly in areas where the authorities do not want Roma to return.

During the conflict, almost all Roma births took place at home, and an entire generation of Roma has come of age with no official documents. As far as their government is concerned, they don’t exist. Civil registration efforts by the UN, OSCE, and NGOs, including local Roma NGOs, have yielded mixed results. After centuries of discrimination in the region and a decade of broken promises from the international community, outsiders’ good intentions are met with understandable skepticism.

Kosovo may be at peace, but it is not yet a place where Roma can feel safe on their own streets, nevermind enjoy an equal standard of education, find employment, access healthcare, or take part in wider community life. The Kosovo Government has few resources and no strategy for reintegrating the thousands of Roma soon to be repatriated from Western Europe.

In the aftermath of conflicts in which entire ethnic groups are displaced, governments and international organizations struggle to facilitate refugee returns in a manner that respects the rights and agency of refugees while also ensuring that people go home, that, in the words of one of my former bosses, “we don’t allow ethnic cleansing to pay.” If Germany and other countries insist on sending Roma refugees back to Kosovo against the wishes of the refugees themselves and the recommendations of the UNHCR, the least those countries can do is scale up their contributions to rebuilding Roma life in Europe’s youngest, most fragile state. That requires not only aid, but diplomatic pressure on the Kosovo government to make good on its promises to ensure returnees' safety and quality of life.

[Photo: Life in a Refugee Camp by UNHCR. Roma family from Kosovo. / UNHCR / L. Taylor / 6 August 2008]

A word on comments: This post is about Roma returns to Kosovo --not Albanians, or Serbs, or NATO, or Bill Clinton, or Bosnia, or Kosovo's independence. When you comment here, you do so in a private space. Racist and off-topic comments will not be tolerated on this or any other post on War and Peace. I know how nasty things can get in the comment sections of blog posts about Kosovo, and I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I don't play those games. This isn't Comment is Free.