Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
set up several local organizations and one national association which
assists with reception of the thousands of Kosovar refugees who arrived in
the summer of 1999.
According to Tahir, the tragedy that the Romany survived in Kosovo
should be attributed to the status assigned to his people since the regime of
Marshall Tito. Tahir then listed the process by which this was enforced, a
method common to many societies and nationalist politics. In his words:
Roma in Tito’s Yugoslavia were not recognized as a population but as an
ethnic group… and as an ethnic group you are too low [in the social hierarchy]
so talking about nationalities, the Roma were not included… they
said that the majority were Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Albanians,
Macedonians… for instance they used to say: “in Kosovar Albanians,
Serbs, Montenegrins, Muslims, Gorani and other ethnic groups live…”
always other ethnic groups without name, without saying Roma.
Tahir’s points lead us to a discussion of Roma culture and how it has interacted
with a non-Roma system of values, in which the absence of a territory
where their identities might take root, has meant discrimination and
misunderstanding. The fact that the Romany have never had “their own”
country, has made them targets of violence in the past and in the present.
The fact that the Romany have not found the means to struggle collectively
for the right to build their own nation has made them even weaker in the
current power structure of Kosovo.
The histories that have been published about the Romany describe them as
able to adapt to the cultures they encounter during their travels.
Sometimes, they are labelled bearers of a weak identity, and in other studies,
the importance of their group culture is stressed. To the Romany, however,
a population is split between themselves and the non-Romany or
Gazhe. There is a hierarchy in this division, and usually the Gazhe are perceived
as inferior, gullible and tainted. Nevertheless, the Romany/non-
Romany boundary is a cornerstone of Roma ethnicity, and the survival of
the Romany depends upon crossing this boundary to negotiate a living
space for themselves in the larger and dominant Gazhe milieu. To explore
this, Carol Silverman studied American Gypsy culture and particularly the
way in which Gypsies cultivate their distinct “ethnic” identity, while still
appearing to assimilate into the “external” culture:
Although many innovations have occurred in Roma culture, they do not
point to loss of ethnic identity; rather, change is a strategy of adaptation
to new environments – both a strategy of manipulation of new situations
and a creative response to them (Silverman, 1988: 261-262).
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