Читать книгу Wastelands - Eirik Saethre - Страница 8

Four years before that night with Bekim, I arrived in Belgrade to explore the feasibility of conducting anthropological research in informal Romani settlements. During that initial trip I quickly became aware of how Roma were both exceptionally visible and relentlessly hidden. Every day I saw Roma. When I walked to the grocery store or to the tram stop, I observed Roma sorting through dumpsters, begging at traffic lights, and pedaling three-wheeled bicycles called trokolice. As I sat in my apartment, I regularly heard the clop, clop, clop of horses’ hooves on the asphalt before catching a glimpse of a Rom driving a cart laden with scrap metal. Scavenging, coupled with their noticeably dark skin and black hair, marked Roma as Other. Their difference was obvious but also unremarkable. My Serbian neighbors were accustomed to passing Roma on the street and standing next to them at convenience stores. Yet despite the ubiquity and visibility of Roma, they were in many ways just as much of a mystery to my neighbors as they were to me. When I asked where the Romani horsemen were from or how many settlements were in the vicinity, Serbs could not answer. They passed the same Romani individuals every day but knew nothing about their everyday lives. Echoing Deon, one woman replied, “cigani live in their own world.” This book explores the alternating contexts of visibility and invisibility to understand the complex relationships that occur between Roma and Serbs, between Roma and the state, and between Roma and a global economy of trash.

Serbs saw little reason to know the particulars of Romani lives because cigani were assumed to be a homogeneous and eternal underclass. Cigani would always be poor and dirty, I was told. They lived in shacks and remained unemployed because that was their preferred lifestyle. One man was adamant that although cigani blamed the Serbian government for their poverty, it was their own fault. In their hearts, he said, cigani were different. Overhearing this conversation, a young woman volunteered that when she was a child, her parents told her cigani would kidnap her. To this day she was still terrified. Cigani were deceitful, she added, predicting they would only talk to me for money and would never be my friends. Others were concerned that I would be robbed or assaulted while visiting Romani settlements. One man believed that my informants would encourage me to steal manhole covers or electrical wires. Once the police discovered these crimes, he continued, they would send me to prison while the instigators remained free. Although most comments focused on the inherent laziness and criminality of Roma, a few stressed their carefree attitude. One woman remarked that cigani always smiled and laughed even though they could not feed themselves. These Serbian narratives were a patchwork of uncertainties, emotions, and moral equivalencies that exerted considerable power but were ultimately, and necessarily, based in ignorance.

Stereotypes of Roma were not confined to Belgrade. For hundreds of years, representations of Gypsies have circulated through Europe and North America.⁴ Authors including Shakespeare (Othello), Cervantes (La gitanilla), Austen (Emma), Hugo (Hunchback of Notre Dame), Lawrence (The Virgin and the Gipsy), and King (Thinner) have written about Roma while painters such as Hals (The Gypsy Girl), Caravaggio (The Fortune Teller), Manet (Gypsy with a Cigarette), and van Gogh (The Caravans—Gypsy Camp near Arles) have depicted them. In the 1990s the films of Emir Kusturica, such as Time of the Gypsies and Black Cat, White Cat, exposed international audiences to Balkan accounts of Roma. Today, Roma are most conspicuously represented in reality shows such as Gypsy Sisters, Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, and American Gypsies. Nevertheless, Romani characters have also graced Buffy the Vampire Slayer, MacGyver, X-Men, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Criminal Minds. In most renderings Gypsies are cast as a mix of thieves, fortunetellers, and exotic vagabonds. These various depictions are unified by a common theme: the stranger among us. Gypsies are familiar yet separate. They constitute a permanently marginal and potentially dangerous population who are inherently alien, unable to integrate into modern society, and capable of assailing national norms and values.⁵

This is particularly true in representations of, and responses to, Romani disparities. In many cases, segregation and disadvantage are portrayed as intractable expressions of an innate Romani desire to remain apart and preserve an itinerant lifestyle.⁶ While ostensibly dedicated to aiding Roma, initiatives such as the Decade of Roma Inclusion stigmatize Roma, invoke poverty, and make a point of notionally separating them from the non-Romani population.⁷ These attitudes are on vivid display in newspapers and magazines such as The Economist, where one headline declares that Roma are “Europe’s biggest societal problem.” To express the magnitude of Romani destitution, it opines that Romani settlements “rival Africa or India for their deprivation.”⁸ This article renders Roma as so fundamentally different that their communities have more in common with iconically impoverished countries than they do with Europe. In reality, many Roma are members of the middle class, own multistory homes, and work as salaried employees. However, the affluence of some Roma is ignored as identity and indigence are conflated. This discourse relies upon the fixity of stereotypes through which non-Roma construct and perpetuate Gypsy identity while Roma remain virtually powerless to shape dominant narratives about themselves.⁹

After a few weeks of hearing horses pass beneath my window and being told stories of dirty and dangerous cigani, I finally met a resident of a Romani settlement. One afternoon as I was disposing of my trash, a middle-aged man arrived on his trokolica and began sifting through the dumpster’s contents. I approached him and explained that I was an American anthropologist who wanted to understand the histories and everyday lives of Roma living in the area.¹⁰ Did he have a few minutes to talk to me? Yes, he replied. After telling me that his name was Endrit, he immediately asserted that he had not always lived in a shack. Born in Kosovo in 1968, Endrit spent his childhood in Germany where he attended school and excelled at gymnastics. He returned to what was then Yugoslavia as a teenager, eventually completing his mandatory military service, marrying, purchasing a home in Kosovo, and fathering six children. But Endrit’s life changed forever in 1999 when war and ethnic cleansing enveloped the region. Fearing for his safety, he fled with his family to Belgrade.

Endrit’s circumstances were the result of violent conflict and not a culture of poverty as so many Serbs assumed. Narratives underscoring ciganski foreignness fail to acknowledge the degree to which Roma have been embedded in European trajectories. Despite living in Europe for centuries, Roma were rendered as a people without history.¹¹ In reality, national and international crises, such as the geopolitical fragmentation of the Balkans, have fundamentally shaped their existence. As ethnic Serbs and ethnic Albanians sparred over control of Kosovo, Roma were not only displaced; their identity was splintered. Endrit, I would eventually learn, identified as neither a cigan nor a Rom. He was Ashkali. Endrit’s ethnicity was the result of recent events in a centuries-long struggle over self-determination in Kosovo.

For most of its history, Kosovo has been home to a multiethnic population of Serbs, Albanians, and Roma. Today, Serbs view Kosovo as an indisputable part of their nation’s territory, pointing to its role as a political and religious center of the thirteenth-century Kingdom of Serbia. However, the Ottoman Empire annexed Kosovo in the fifteenth century and Albanian-speaking people began to settle the area in greater numbers. When Yugoslavia was formed after World War I, Muslim Albanians had firmly replaced Orthodox Christian Serbs as Kosovo’s majority population.¹² Ethnic tensions between the two groups had occasionally flared into violence, but Josef Tito’s socialist government muscularly repressed any anti-Yugoslav sentiments. In an effort to build a unified nation, Roma were also integrated into the state apparatus alongside other ethnic groups. By the 1970s, Yugoslavia boasted antidiscrimination legislation, a prohibition on using the word cigan, and unprecedented access to education and employment for Roma.¹³

After Tito’s death in 1980, ethnic ambitions were rekindled. By 1991 Yugoslavia was disintegrating as its constituent republics were declaring independence. With war erupting in Croatia and Bosnia, the Serbian government of Slobodan Milošević tightened control over Kosovo. In response, Kosovar Albanians increasingly called for self-determination and soon the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was attacking Serbian security personnel. In 1999 urban warfare, shelling, and ethnic cleansing were occurring across the province as Serbs expelled Albanians. In an effort to end the conflict, NATO conducted a bombing campaign targeting strategic sites across Serbia. The offensive lasted seventy-eight days and resulted in the withdrawal of Serbian forces and a ceasefire. At the end of the war, 8,000–10,000 people had died with thousands more missing.¹⁴ To forestall future violence and ensure the safety of returning Albanians, NATO stationed peacekeepers in Kosovo. Several years later, the Albanian-dominated government declared its independence from Serbia. The United States and most member states of the European Union (EU) recognized Kosovo’s new status, but Serbia has steadfastly refused to abandon its claim to the region.

Although the war was fought between Serbs and Albanians, it deeply affected the lives of Kosovo’s Roma. Prior to the conflict, Kosovo was home to an estimated 100,000–150,000 Roma, which some scholars have separated into two broad groups.¹⁵ The first lived primarily in Serbian-dominated areas and was conversant in Romani and Serbian. In the 1970s and 1980s these individuals increasingly embraced a Romani identity that was in opposition to Albanian nationalism.¹⁶ When the Milošević government forced Albanians out of public-sector jobs, these Roma, who generally backed the Serbian state, were hired if no Serbs were available.¹⁷ The second Romani group resided in Albanian regions and spoke only Albanian, having lost proficiency in Romani approximately two generations earlier. Kosovar independence advocates urged these individuals to record their ethnicity as Albanian on the census to bolster the case for autonomy.¹⁸ Eventually, Albanian-speakers would reject the label of Roma in favor of two alternate ethnicities: Egyptian and Ashkali.¹⁹

Beginning in the 1980s, evidence from Byzantine texts bolstered narratives of an Egyptian migration to Europe, while folktales described a Romani kingdom in North Africa.²⁰ Seizing on these stories, a movement to adopt an Egyptian identity was born, and in 1991 the Yugoslav government approved “Egyptian” as a census category.²¹ Serbian nationalists were quick to support the Egyptian label for their own purposes, hoping it would simultaneously reduce the number of Albanians recorded in the census and prove to international governments that Kosovo was a multiethnic province, not an Albanian one. Firmly embedded within a specific geopolitical context, the creation and perpetuation of Romani and Egyptian identities was fueled by the disputes between Serbians and Albanians.

During the Kosovo War, cigani were targeted by both sides, their property was destroyed, and they were subjected to assault and murder.²² Although the 1999 ceasefire was celebrated as the end of ethnic warfare, there was little relief for Roma and Egyptians. Albanians fighting for independence viewed Romani-speaking Roma and Egyptians, both of whom had relied on the state bureaucracy, as collaborating with the Milošević government.²³ In retaliation, Albanian refugees returning to Kosovo sought revenge for perceived past injustices. The KLA and other nationalist groups have been accused of rape, forced labor, and confiscating personal possessions.²⁴ Not expecting the Albanian victims to become victimizers, NATO peacekeepers did little to stop the violence. Even international efforts to shield Roma from retribution resulted in harm. The inhabitants of a United Nations refugee camp situated near a heavy metal mining complex were exposed to toxic levels of lead for over a decade.²⁵

As brutality against cigani continued, a third identity, Ashkali, was popularized.²⁶ Ashkali attempted to mitigate the risk of reprisals by distancing themselves from Roma and Egyptians while stressing their affiliation with Kosovar Albanians, for instance by emphasizing their use of the Albanian language and ignorance of Romani.²⁷ With Ashkali ethnicity becoming increasingly common, international peacekeeping bodies such as NATO and the OSCE took notice. These organizations eventually accepted Ashkali as an independent group, arguing that self-determination was an integral component of an international human rights framework.²⁸ Relying on the support of these bodies, the Kosovar government, and its constitution, also acknowledged Ashkali as a category while Serbia added the classification to its 2002 census.²⁹ But even as their ethnicity gained recognition, Ashkali were still bound by enduring stereotypes of cigani.³⁰

Despite stressing an allegiance to Albanian language and customs, brown skin marked Ashkali as aliens in an Albanian-dominated Kosovo. Like Roma and Egyptians, Ashkali were excluded from the postwar nationalist narrative and cast as hindering the development of an ethnically pure Albanian-dominated Kosovo. As a result Ashkali were forcefully expelled alongside Roma and Egyptians. Under the watch of NATO troops, 12,600 Romani, Ashkali, and Egyptian homes were partially or completely destroyed.³¹ These and other acts of ethnic cleansing resulted in a mass exodus. Approximately a hundred thousand Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptians fled Kosovo, leaving as few as eleven thousand in the country.³² Many families applied for asylum in Germany and other countries in the European Union, but most of these requests were eventually denied, resulting in forced repatriation to Kosovo. The largest percentage of those displaced, about half, sought safety in Serbia.³³ Endrit and his family were among this group.

In Belgrade, Ashkali were invisible refugees. Their history of eviction was publicly unnoticed and unacknowledged. To Serbs, who watched from a distance as Endrit rummaged through dumpsters, he was simply another cigan. They did not realize that his life in Belgrade was the result of being a bystander at the margins of the aspirations of others. Furthermore, nationalist ambitions resulted in the bureaucratic misrecognition of Endrit’s status. Serbia’s continuing claims to Kosovo officially rendered Ashkali internally displaced persons (IDPs), not refugees.³⁴ Because many Ashkali lacked identification or possessed invalid documents, they were unable to prove their citizenship, attend school, obtain routine public health care, get married, receive welfare, or purchase property. They interacted with the state only by suffering a medical emergency or by being arrested and imprisoned. Legal and economic exclusion facilitated spatial segregation. Having no place to settle, many Ashkali constructed their own housing in illegal settlements. Ashkali were so marginalized that they have been labeled the most vulnerable community in Serbia.³⁵

Like numerous others, Endrit’s family built a shack of discarded plywood, old doors, and tarps alongside other Ashkali in a field on the periphery of the city. The settlement, Zgrade, would eventually contain thirty-two structures sheltering approximately 150 people. Lacking secure tenure, sufficient living space, durable edifices, water, and sanitation, Zgrade was, according to UN-HABITAT’s definition, a slum.³⁶ But the settlement was also a home. It was here that Endrit’s daughter, Fatime, would meet and marry Bekim before moving into their own shack to start a family.³⁷ As months became years, Zgrade incubated Ashkali personhood. The everyday life of settlements generated belonging and solidarity, defining the place of Ashkali in Serbia and the world. Examining a Burundian refugee camp in Tanzania, Malkki notes that Hutu “located their identities within their very displacement, extracting meaning and power from the interstitial social location they inhabited. Instead of losing their collective identity, this is where they made it.”³⁸ A similar process occurred in Zgrade. Although Ashkali identity was formed from the Kosovo War, living in Belgrade’s settlements solidified it.