In the 1980s, a growing number of Kosovo's majority Albanian population agitated to turn the province into an ethnically pure republic, free of all non-Albanian groups. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA or UCK) emerged as the primary expression of Albanian separatism. The second largest population in Kosovo, the Serbs, resisted any such effort to divorce Kosovo from Yugoslavia. Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Yugoslavia at that time, revoked the autonomous status in Kosovo and reinstalled the minority Serbian government, which began oppressing ethnic Albanians. By the mid-1990s, the struggle between Serbs and Albanians erupted into violent civil war. Kosovo’s Roma were tragically caught in the crossfire.

As documented by Amnesty International and others, the KLA began to persecute all of Kosovo’s non-Albanians at the same time that Serbian authorities and Serb paramilitary groups were viciously attacking Albanians. The attempt by Roma in general to steer a neutral course was viewed by both Serbs and Albanians as collaboration with the enemy.

When NATO intervened with its bombing campaign on behalf of the Albanians, it precipitated the massive flight of Kosovo’s Serb, Albanian, Roma and other populations. Some Roma who remained in Kosovo were brutally harassed by Serbian militias for allegedly helping their Albanian neighbors; many more were attacked and often killed by KLA forces who embarked on a systematic and largely successful effort to rid Kosovo of its entire non-Albanian population.

While the Roma have always faced discrimination and oppression throughout former Yugoslavia from Serbs, Croats and Albanians alike, after the 1999 war the terrible treatment of Roma in Kosovo increased dramatically. On the pretext that the Roma had been Serb collaborators, many Albanians forced Romani families to leave their homes on a moment’s notice. Roma were stripped of their possessions, tortured, raped, disappeared, and killed in Albanian pogroms.

Although there may have been minimal coerced collaboration of some Roma in certain Serb dominated regions, this was not, by any means, a Kosovo-wide phenomenon. Indeed, based on firsthand observations, experiences and interviews with displaced Roma in and from Kosovo, Polansky and others have documented the absence of Roma collaboration with the Serbs in their conflict with the Albanians.

Ceda Prlincevic, head of the Jewish community in Prishtina, who himself was robbed of his possessions and forced to flee, states: "To [the KLA-UCK] everybody was a collaborator who was against the secession, no matter if they were Serbs, Roma, Gorans, we Jews and even Albanians."²¹

The end of the NATO bombing campaign marked the return of power in Kosovo to the Albanians, now with the additional support of US and European governments, the protection of UNMIK and KFOR, and the worldwide assumption that the Albanians were "right" and the Serbs were "evil" and the "humanitarian bombing" was a success. The massive support of the West and the postwar Albanian triumph emboldened hardcore nationalists who had always wanted and fought for an "ethnically pure" Albanian Kosovo. Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright repeatedly reminded ethnic Albanians, both during and after the NATO intervention, that there would be no partitioning of Kosovo, as this solution "… is against the theories that we have had about [preserving] a multiethnic (sic) society."²² But the dream of a "Greater Albania," which would link the ethnic Albanian populations of Kosovo and Macedonia (and even Greece and Bulgaria) to Albania, still motivates Albanian extremists in their actions against the few remaining ethnic minority populations in Kosovo.