Kultura (Skopje) (Mar 2014)
Unheard Voices: Roma and the Kosovo War
Abstract
The Kosovo conflict is usually seen – and remembered – as a conflict between ethnic Serbs and ethnic Albanians. It was the escalating armed conflict between these two ethnic groups following the revoking of Kosovo’s autonomy by the Miloševič regime in Bel-grade in 1989 which led to NATO’s military intervention in the spring of 1999. However, this focus on the Serbi-an-Albanian confrontation meant that the fate of the Ro-ma, Ashkali and Egyptian communities in this conflict has been largely overlooked. Both within Kosovo and outside, their experiences and memories remain widely unconnected to the wider narrative and collective memory of the conflict, even though the Roma consti-tuted a significant proportion of the overall population and one upon whom the conflict had an enormous im-pact.
