Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
old and young people. While there was less “urgency” to return in the
accounts of men who had immigrated to Italy at the beginning of the
1990s, they also reported that they would like to live in Kosovo, if the economic
and social situation there was better.
The Romany also positioned themselves as victims in conversations about
their history as a people, and yet they described themselves in a way that
was neither silent nor passive. Instead, they used their victimized position
to express themselves, their identity and culture, and to claim rights and
recognition for the hardships they had seen.
I don’t talk only for myself but as the Roma population… in our history
we have never attacked another population, we are known as pacifists…
we are never for the war and there [in Kosovo] we were in-between…
trapped between two nationalisms… [Tahir]
We are a bit of a strange population because no one takes care of us, the
newspapers and TV never talk about our problems… we are outside of
all discourses… [Andri]
No one talks about our things… just nomads, nomads, nomads… [Blerta]
Up to this point we can say that we have done so much to come here and
all are against us, not only Serbs and Albanians… we are all around
Europe and just 1 person of 1,000 wants to help this Rom… [Sofia]
In this last quotation, past and present merge together into a reality of continuous
discrimination: the Romany have managed to escape the
Albanians and the Serbs, and yet they are still pursued by prejudice and
poverty in Italy and throughout Europe. In some of the interviews, the
open discrimination was explained by the historical lack of political organization
amongst Romany. The fact that they had no politicians, no police,
no representatives in any institutions was emphasized as one of the reasons
why the Romany could not counter the violence that has been aimed
against them. According to some studies about the Romany living in post-
Communist countries, an effort is being made to organize some of the
population into Roma political parties and institutions, but the process
seems quite problematic, both because of the lack of what we might call a
western idea of politics, and because of opposition from other non-Roma
parties. (Barany, 1995, 1998). In his account, Tahir stated that the Romany
had tried to organize, in order to better deal with the conflict of Kosovo,
but that the Serbs had opposed and suppressed their attempts at uniting.
The conflicts and Diaspora experiences thus created a new situation for the
Romany in Kosovo, excluding them from the public sphere, just as they
had been in other eastern European countries. In Italy, the Romany have
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