How Roma People Suffered in the Bosnian War

Uninvestigated, unpunished and forgotten crimes

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Roma minority was subjected to all kinds of crimes during the war – crimes that are not spoken about publicly and have never been investigated or prosecuted. Always on the margins of society, Roma people have no trust in the authorities and are reluctant to talk about what happened to them during the war.

By: Lamija Grebo

Edin gives the impression of a man full of confidence as he greets us and sits down on a chair in front of the camera. He is one of the few Roma people who agreed to speak about what they went through during the war, on the condition that we conceal his identity. Therefore Edin is not his real name.

As soon as the camera starts rolling, Edin becomes visibly upset.

Through his tears, he recalls two Roma men being killed as they were captured, while the others were taken to a police station where they were mistreated, and then to the military barracks in his town.

He also experienced mistreatment at the hands of people who has been his schoolmates.

“They find out who is there, and then they call you by your name and take you out, and do whatever they want. You can’t touch them“, he says.

Edin survived being used as a human shield, physical mistreatment and forced labour. In the end, the toughest blow was the way his mother paid to have him freed from the detention facility.

“The hardest part for me was hearing that my mother bought me”, he laments tearfully.

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“I will never forget that. Here, people could be bought, just like cattle. They buy you and they sell you“.

Although he worked up the courage to speak to Detektor about the humiliation he suffered, he asked us to protect his identity for several reasons. He still lives in the municipality where he was seized and detained as a young man in May 1992, along with other individuals, including other Roma people.

These days, most Roma people do not want to talk about their suffering, even with their identities protected, although, just like other people during the war, some of them were killed, expelled, detained in detention camps, subjected to various forms of torture and sexual abuse, and their property was destroyed. Roma people also participated in the war as combatants, but very little is known about that in the public arena.

There is no official data about the exact number of Roma casualties, and little or no talk in the public arena about how this ethnic minority has suffered in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“First of all, the public do not know”, Dervo Sejdic, a researcher and president of Kali Sara - Roma Information Centre explains.

“On the other hand, institutions of government and, I would say, researchers of war crimes have not addressed the issue of crimes against Roma people. Above all, it is important for us that the public knows to what extent we suffered, what atrocities were committed against us, and that we are trying to get to the truth about who did that to us, and of course, to achieve justice“, he said.

Zijo Ribic survived the shooting of about 30 Roma people from Skocic, near Zvornik, when he was eight years old, while his entire family was killed. After the war, Zijo went to school, got a job and started a family. He has told his life story many times around the world. Despite everything he has experienced and the fact that he is still searching for the remains of one of his sisters, Zijo has never learned to hate.

In a joint project, the Srebrenica Memorial Centre, in cooperation with the Kali Sara Association and BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina/Detektor, has initiated a process through which these crimes will be investigated and documented, to present the truth about and the extent of Roma suffering during the war.

Some Roma people still live in places where they were abused. This is the case with a woman who spoke to us and asked for her name to be withheld because of the nature of the crime she was subjected to, but also because she occasionally sees her abusers on the street.

“I recognise some of them here. And I always see them when I go to the store or when I walk around town with my kids. I recognise them and when they see me, they look at me in horror“, the woman says.

With her family and other Roma, she was detained in several cities and locations where some of them were beaten up, raped and killed. She finds it hard to talk about what happened to her. As she speaks, she takes longer pauses and lowers her voice.

“They took us to make our fathers watch what they were doing to us. They grabbed my five-year-old brother and slammed him against the edge of the wall, and when they said [to her father]: ‘Don’t you feel sorry for this child, about what we’re doing to her?’, he said: ‘I feel sorry for both children, they’re my children. Kill me and my children. Don’t mistreat them so much.’ They locked us up, and they took me out, and they did all sorts of things to me“, she said.

Her story and other similar stories from Roma people should be more widely known, Emir Suljagic, believes the director of the Srebrenica Memorial Centre.

It’s time for that to change, he declares.

“During the siege and during the fall of Srebrenica, a large Roma community lived there. Many of them were prominent in offering resistance, they shared the same fate with us, they shared hunger with us, and I think we haven’t addressed that enough“, Suljagic says.

Although research has been conducted into crimes in a certain area where the suffering of Roma people has been documented along with that of other ethnic groups, it has never been addressed separately, researcher Ejub Zukic said. She added that this is a pioneering project.

Using a special methodological approach to research, mapping and documentation, crimes committed against Roma were investigated in this way for the first time. Researchers with a lot of experience in locating victims, sites of individual and mass graves, and perpetrators of war crimes, took part in the documentation process.

While waiting for the authorities to begin investigating crimes against Roma people, Fadil Ferhatovic started collecting evidence on his own, as well as searching for the missing in the village of Skocic, near Zvornik, on the border with Serbia.

“All those who were killed in the village of Skocic were found in the Crni Vrh [mass] grave”, he says.

Fadil asked family members to give blood for DNA analysis, and a significant number of relatives did.

“Unfortunately, we are still searching for [a DNA match for] one woman, for whom there is no one to give DNA”, Fadil says.

While the crime committed against Roma people in Skocic is perhaps the best-known, with a court case having been conducted in Belgrade, numerous crimes against Roma have not been investigated or prosecuted. The public know almost nothing about them.

As well as Zukic, Sejdic and researchers from Kali Sara, Omer Gabela, who has longstanding experience in investigating war crimes, joined the research into the suffering of Roma people.

“Roma people were not spared all forms and kinds of war crimes, including murders, rape, detention in concentration camps, expulsions, destruction of property and arson“, he says.

Investigators faced several obstacles and problems in the field, primarily because some members of the Roma community do not identify as Roma at all.

“On the ground, we’re facing a problem when we get in touch with some members of the Romani ethnic minority. Either they do not identify as members of the Romani ethnic minority, or they identify as ‘white Roma’. However, in conversations with non-Roma people, they are seen as such, and they live life according to Romani culture and traditions“, Sejdic says.

He thinks that stigma, discrimination, prejudices, stereotypes and the level of racism towards the Roma population in Bosnia and Herzegovina are the reasons why Roma do not identify as such.

Senad Sejdic from Visoko confirmed that he chose not to identify as Roma some time ago precisely for these reasons. But for him, things have changed. After spending the war in the army, being injured and losing his brother Maso, Senad now has no problem identifying as Roma.

“Now I identify as one. Now I’m not ashamed. Now I have no prejudices that someone will say something to me and that they could humiliate me“, he says.

In comparison to other ethnic groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Roma people are far from equal.

The suffering and expulsion of Roma People in Eastern Bosnia

The suffering of Roma people in Foca

In the Foca municipality, Roma used to live in two places, Sukovac and Miljevina. Like other non-Serbs, they were expelled from the Foca area, while their property was destroyed. There is no data about the suffering of Roma people in the area, except for an indictment filed by the District Public Prosecutor’s Office in Trebinje, stating that Romani ethnicity individuals were imprisoned in a barracks, and that one Roma person was killed. This case has not been concluded.

Ismet Vehabovic welcomes us into the warmth of his home in the Romska Varda settlement in Kakanj. He proudly declares that the settlement was established 100 years ago and is older than the municipality itself.

Vehabovic served with the military during the war, but he notes that even while serving, there was discrimination against Roma people, even though they were part of the same force. The situation has not improved since the war, he says.

“Roma is a fancy word for a Gypsy. So they don’t offend you. No one will say that a Roma offended someone, but a gypsy. And we are always gypsies, no matter how many university courses we finish, we will always be gypsies, and no matter if we have a master’s degree, we will always be gypsies for them, and that’s it, end of story. It makes no difference to me. Believe me, I’m used to these things. But we gypsies don’t have the same rights as Muslims and Croats and Serbs in Kakanj“, he says.

The Roma population in Bosnia and Herzegovina generally does not trust the authorities, nor does it trust investigative and judicial bodies, which is why it is difficult to find interviewees.

Gabela points out that investigators on the ground have noticed that many Roma people are still afraid of speaking about what happened to them during the war.

“We had a situation where a man told us there was a murder, he was a witness to imprisonment, he buried people who had been killed, he was a witness to a rape, but when we made an offer him to talk and to present his story, he said: ‘I can’t, sometimes I go there, to my birthplace and I can’t talk'“, he says.

DDervo Sejdic doubts that the exact number of Roma people who were killed or tortured will be known any time soon - perhaps never.

“Memorialisation is important so the issue can be studied in school literature in the future, and to leave the legacy of the suffering of Roma people for future generations, so they continue to investigate, and so we all continue to memorialise all the suffering of the Roma population in Bosnia and Herzegovina“, he says.

There are no more Roma people in many places where they lived before the war.

“Foca, Gorazde, Visegrad, Cajnice, Srebrenica, Bratunac, and we can also partly include Vlasenica, Zvornik and Bijeljina – this area is now almost empty of Roma people. We can also mention another settlement, Nova Kasaba, where there was a street called Ciganluk, which was completely inhabited by residents of Romani ethnicity. Today, there is no one there“, Gabela says.