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14 THE YUGOSLAV ROMA UNDER SLOBODAN MILOSEVI– AND AFTER DENNIS REINHARTZ I n the intricate history of Eastern and Central Europe since the Middle Ages, the Roma (Gypsies) repeatedly have been the oppressed “forgotten other.” This congenital torment has also been aggravated periodically by war, as with the victimization of the Roma during the Holocaust of World War Two.1 Since the beginning of the dissolution of Titoist Yugoslavia in 1989, the persecution of the Roma once again has gone largely unnoticed in the West and by the Western media. As a consequence of a combination of chronic historical intolerance and more current political and socioeconomic factors, during the wars of Yugoslav succession—the wars between the new Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) and Slovenia and Croatia, the Bosnian civil war, and the Kosovo crisis—the Roma were yet again severely maltreated. Within the scope of this presentation, the roles of the historical issues, the current deteriorating conditions, and the apparent lack of Western attention to the situation of the Roma and their ongoing persecutions are assessed while at the same time discerning the specific localisms vis-à-vis the Gypsies of Slobodan Milopevi_’s Serbia and Montenegro and the other pertinent Yugoslav successor states. The prospects for the former Yugoslav Roma in the shorter term are considered briefly as well. From the End of the Pax Ottomanica to the End of Titoist Yugoslavia As throughout much of Eastern Europe, there has been a continuous Romany presence in the Yugoslav lands since at least the Middle Ages. Having perhaps come north from Thrace, the first Gypsies arrived among the South Slavs sometime in the middle of the thirteenth century. Their first documented appearance was in Macedonia in 1289.2 Certainly, after the Turkish conquest of the Balkans in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially Muslim Roma were encouraged to settle in the Yugoslav lands beyond Macedonia among the Serbs of Kosovo (1348), the Sanduak, Bosnia, and elsewhere.3 This kind of resettlement was in line with the longstanding Ottoman policies to transplant and thereby mix subjugated peoples to make them easier to control.4 Many of the Gypsies came to reside in the cities and towns.5 With the gradual elimination of the Ottoman overlordship prior to World War One, the Roma largely remained to become a part of South Slav life. Gypsies were part of Karadjorje’s rising against the Turks in 1803–04,6 and by 1815, there were about ten thousand of them in the Ottoman Pawalik of Belgrade .7 The majority were still Muslim, but a growing minority of them also were Serbian Orthodox.8 Serbian state councilor Steven Petrovi_ Knivanin ’s victorious army against the Hungarians in 1848–49 included a legendary “squadron of Gypsies.”9 The sparse and largely anecdotal historical record of the Yugoslav Roma in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is marked by periodic discrimination , though on occasion favoritism as well.10 A good number of them were illiterate, and to survive and even prosper, they also became very good at not being noticed by o‹cialdom. In the newly expanded Serbia of Knez Milop Obrenovi_ of 1833–34, most towns had flourishing Gypsy quarters, where the traditional occupations of blacksmithing, horse-trading , bear leading, faith healing, tinkering, cobbling, textile and basket weaving , music, and begging were practiced.11 Obrenovi_ even had his own Gypsy orchestra.12 In the first volume of his memoirs, Montenegrin writer and Yugoslav leader Milovan Djilas points out that the employment of Roma in occupations like blacksmithing and even grave digging was very necessary before World War One. The Gypsies, even Muslims, were therefore generally tolerated.13 He also reflects that in his town the Gypsy houses were indistinguishable from those of Montenegrin peasants.14 In Serbia, the Roma also were perhaps more tolerated because of Serbian Orthodoxy, whereas the Roman Catholicism of the Croats and Slovenes of the Austro -Hungarian Empire to the north may have been conducive to greater discrimination, as it also seems to have been toward the Jews. The Roma managed much the same under the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, proclaimed by the Declaration of Corfu in 1917, and its successor, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, declared in 1929 under the royal dictatorship of King Aleksandar. By 1941, there were more than three hundred thousand Gypsies in Yugoslavia, and most of them, with the exception of those in Montenegro, the Gurbeti, were permanently settled, many in ghettosinthelargercitieslikeBelgrade,Skopje,andSarajevo.Manyof...

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