As this report goes to press, Paul Polansky is once again in Kosovo with the Roma. His most recent update of the situation as of January 2002 will be included as an attachment to this report.

The pervasive and well-founded fear for their personal safety is perhaps the greatest problem facing the Roma in post-war Kosovo. As Polansky’s survey and field reports describe in detail, most Roma who remain in Kosovo are simply afraid to step foot outside their homes/villages.

Roma are fearful that they may be beaten or shot if they leave their homes. They are afraid to speak their native language in public. They fear sending their children to schools, and fear visiting family members who may live only miles away. These fears are based on very clear and present dangers on the ground.

Data collected by Polansky from his Summer 2001 visit reveals that one-third of the communities surveyed that had a Romani population prior to the 1999 war now have no Roma at all.

Even after the arrival in Kosovo of NATO's KFOR (Kosovo peace keeping forces) in June 1999, approximately 12,600 homes occupied by Roma were partially or, in most cases, completely destroyed.

Eyewitness testimony gathered by Polansky and other Voice of Roma delegates in visits to Kosovo and Macedonia in 1999, 2000 and 2001, along with reports by other human rights organizations, demonstrate a systematic campaign of persecution and ethnic cleansing of the Roma by extremist ethnic Albanians.

In mid-1999, the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) sent a fact-finding mission to Kosovo. In what it characterized as a "pogrom situation," the ERRC documented an array of gross human rights violations inflicted on Roma, primarily at the hands of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians: murder, abductions, rape, torture, illegal detention, confiscation of property and personal belongings, expulsions from homes and communities, looting and destruction of Romani homes, and other humiliating and degrading treatment on a "mass scale." The ERRC states that the Kosovar Albanians are "evidently intent on purging Kosovo of Roma"³ in the wake of the Yugoslav military’s withdrawal from the region in June 1999.

These human rights abuses against Roma are also documented in a Human Rights Watch report which observes that:

Again, it is particularly disturbing to note that these widespread and egregious human rights violations occur despite the presence of international KFOR forces, that were deployed presumably to facilitate and safeguard Kosovo’s passage to becoming a multi-ethnic society.

In a letter dated July 16, 1999 to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, the ERRC stated that its researchers in the Prishtina area "repeatedly witnessed KFOR officers failing to react to the looting and burning of Romani houses occurring in their proximity." ERRC researchers who traveled to the British, French and Italian KFOR zones report they "witnessed numerous instances in which KFOR representatives did not react in situations of mass or individual looting, carried out openly and in broad daylight."