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.
EXCLUDED PEOPLE AND DISCARDED COMMODITIES
Throughout Europe, Romani populations have been confined and controlled for centuries. The most horrific example occurred during the Nazi regime, when Roma were labeled an inferior race, sent to concentration camps, and exterminated.39 Today, Roma are no longer overtly murdered by the state but they continue to be detained in sites across Europe. In Italy, for instance, state-sponsored “nomad camps” are often fenced, guarded, and surrounded by security cameras while residents must meet strict eligibility criteria.40 In areas such as these, the normal rule of law is suspended and ciganski bodies are controlled.41 While I am not equating nomad camps with concentration camps, there is a family resemblance between the two. In each case, cigani were confined, functionally stripped of citizenship, and rendered as nonpeople.
Foucault argues that modern states govern their populace through these conditions.42 In the past, individuals deemed aberrant and a threat to social order were the subjects of explicit violence, but contemporary regimes rely less on openly taking lives. Instead, they subtly disallow existence through “indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.” 43 Agamben builds upon Foucault’s ideas, asserting that sites such as concentration camps, airport detention centers, and squatter settlements are “zones of indistinction,” where noncitizens are defined, labeled expendable, and ultimately left to die.44 These spaces are constituted through a state of exception, when governments portray certain events—such as migration, drug use, or an epidemic—as a national emergency. Then, citing security concerns, the state is able to justify abandoning legal norms and revoking the rights of those judged outside the national order. Citizenship is delineated by forging geographies for noncitizens.
In contrast to many other European countries where Romani camps were created, monitored, and controlled, those in Belgrade were characterized by the state’s absence. While Zgrade was established after the Kosovo War, informal Romani settlements had been a feature of the urban landscape for decades. In the 1960s Roma established Deponija (“landfill” in Serbian) on top of a trash heap surrounded by industrial land. Over the next forty years it became synonymous with destitution, growing to over 153 shanties and 856 people.45 But communities like Deponija were relatively rare until the 1990s. As Serbia was beset by war and economic collapse, settlements began appearing in parklands, under bridges, and on vacant commercial lots throughout the city. Eventually an estimated eight percent of Belgrade’s area was occupied by squatter shacks.46 Casting this as a national crisis, Serbs routinely attributed the proliferation of settlements to the influx of refugees and IDPs. In actuality it was the introduction of neoliberalism during the postsocialist era that played the most significant role.47
With the country’s resources severely strained and prioritized for Serbs, authorities allowed cigani to construct makeshift homes on ostensibly unclaimed land.48 Although the state did not publicly create and monitor settlements, it tacitly supported their existence through deliberate ignorance and lack of intervention. For instance, a municipal worker confessed to me that the city had no reliable record of the number of settlements around Belgrade or their location. Furthermore, no effort was being made to gather this data. But the state’s inability to fund the infrastructure necessary to surveil and regulate ciganski bodies nonetheless resulted in an effective environment of domination. Settlements were clearly delineated from the rest of the nation because they existed in a vacuum. Withholding resources legitimized government portrayals of cigani as inherently Other. As sites like Deponija, Zgrade, and Polje became increasingly visible, they were branded as illegal, unhygienic, and substandard. Informal Romani settlements were icons of impoverishment and cast as a threat to public security, community health, and national safety. And their residents, cigani, were dangerous aliens, undeserving of rights or inclusion, let alone respect.
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