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