1. LET'S GO SHOPPING FOR SNIPER RIFLES (The New York Times)
2. THE ROMA AND "HUMANITARIAN" ETHNIC CLEANSING IN KOSOVO (Dissident
Voice)
LINKS to documents and news on Kosmet's hell:
Source: UN Security Council - Date: 9 Oct 2002
Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Interim
Administration Mission in Kosovo (S/2002/1126)
http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf/vID/1CCD470704F300FB85256C5600679068?OpenDocument
Source: Council of Europe
THE HUMAN RIGHTS SITUATION in Kosovo-Metohija
http://www.commissioner.coe.int/docs/CommDH(2002)11_E.pdf
U.N. police in Kosovo make record drugs haul (Reuters, Sept 29, 2002)
http://news.serbianunity.net/bydate/2002/September_30/21.html
U.N. police crack down on prostitution, drugs in Kosovo (AP 1/10/02)
http://news.serbianunity.net/bydate/2002/September_30/24.html
Appeal of the expelled Serbs from Kosovo and Metohija, OEA, October 1st
2002
http://news.serbianunity.net/bydate/2002/October_01/5.html
RIA "Novosti": Everything`s Fine in Kosovo? (by Valentin Kunin)
http://www.artel.co.yu/en/izbor/jugoslavija/2002-10-19_2.html
Report: Church deeply hurt by the behavor or the U.S. KFOR
http://www.kosovo.com/rep191002.html
New pressures on Visoki Decani monastery
http://www.kosovo.com/news.html
=== 1 ===
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/20/opinion/20SULL.html
THE NEW YORK TIMES, Sunday, October 20, 2002
Shopping for Sniper Rifles
By STACY SULLIVAN
When a sniper began shooting down people in suburban Maryland and
Virginia earlier this month, followed by possible copycat shootings on
Long Island last weekend, I wondered why it hadn't happened sooner.
For the past three years, I have been doing research for a book on how a
group of Kosovar Albanian émigrés in New York City helped build a
guerrilla army by raising money and buying and shipping high-powered
rifles from the United States to the Balkans. In March 2001, I
accompanied one of the key fund-raisers for the Kosovo Liberation Army
to a gun show in suburban Pennsylvania. Sports utility vehicles with
"Sportsmen for Bush" bumper stickers lined the parking lot. Inside, a
throng of people - mostly young men, but also a surprising number of
families with children - strolled past tables laden with AK-47's, M-16
assault rifles, sniper rifles, handguns, flat and round bullets,
brochures for
the National Rifle Association, silencers, night scopes, knives,
Japanese
swords, muskets, daggers, even a couple of anti-aircraft guns, as well
as
paraphernalia from the Civil War, World War I and World War II.
One gun dealer showed me a .32-caliber Thompson automatic weapon that
shoots 32 rounds in less than 2.5 seconds. Another showed me a
.22-caliber
Bushmaster gun with a silencer that was described as "deadly quiet." The
most impressive gun, however, was the .50-caliber high-powered Barrett
sniper rifle. With the .50-caliber rifle, the dealer told me, a good
marksman can kill a large animal from two miles away and an amateur
could probably shoot a person from a mile away. He said he had armor-
piercing, tracer and incendiary .50-caliber bullets available that could
bring down a helicopter. The rifle was going for about $5,000.
As I looked at the gun, my K.L.A. companion beckoned me over to another
stand where a woman was selling a Barrett knock-off, a .50-caliber
sniper rifle made by Armalite that was selling for just $2,495. The
dealer
told me all I had to do was hand over my driver's license for an "Insta-
Check."
"They call this an Insta-Check, but really it takes about 15 minutes,"
she said, referring to the background check she would have to do. As
long
as I didn't have a criminal record or live in the "People's Republic of
New
York City," so called among gun dealers because it's one of the few
cities
where it is illegal to possess any kind of firearm without a permit, the
gun
would be mine. I told her I did live in New York City, but that my
driver's license was issued in California. In that case, she said, I'd
probably be fine.
The K.L.A. member bought a sniper rifle that day, along with a few other
guns. Those weapons were promptly shipped overseas to Kosovo and
Macedonia, another example of American gun laws inadvertently fueling
foreign conflicts.
Ever since that day at the Pennsylvania gun show, I've wondered how hard
it would be to use one of those high-powered sniper-rifles. Last week,
in
a Times report, a retired New York City police detective and security
executive, Richard Dietl, cleared that up a little. He said it took him
one afternoon to teach his 12-year-old son how to hit a target in the
torso from 200 yards away.
The ease with which one can buy weapons at gun shows has not gone
unnoticed by groups like Al Qaeda, which pointed this out in one of its
training manuals. According to the Violence Policy Center, a gun control
advocacy group, Osama bin Laden's agents in the United States purchased
25 high-powered sniper rifles to use in their war against the Soviets in
Afghanistan in the late 1980's. What would stop them from using the guns
against us at home?
We have no idea whether the suburban sniper on the loose inside the
Beltway is a foreign terrorist. It is clear, however, that our gun laws
not only inadvertently fuel foreign conflicts but also enable terrorists
to purchase guns to launch attacks against people on American soil.
Gun control advocates have called for the creation of a ballistic
imaging system to help law enforcement officers trace ammunition
to the guns used to fire them. However, such a high-tech system
would be of little use to law enforcement if the gunman bought his
weapon more than three months before using it. Federal law mandates
that background checks on gun buyers be kept on record for only 90
days, and Attorney General John Ashcroft has proposed shortening
that time to 24 hours. The ability to trace the sniper's 223-caliber
rifle and examine background-check records on the person who
purchased it would be invaluable to the police investigation. Without
it, I can't help wondering how many more victims there will be.
Stacy Sullivan is the author of the forthcoming "From Brooklyn to Kosovo
with Love and Guns."
letters@...
=== 2 ===
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles/Rifati_Kosovo.htm
The Roma and "Humanitarian" Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo
by Sani Rifati
Dissident Voice, October 13, 2002
I am a Rom (more commonly known as "Gypsy") who was born in
Kosovo, Yugoslavia, and lived in Pristina (the capital of the Kosovo
region) for 27 years. In the summer of 2000, ten years later, I was
only 30 miles away in Macedonia but I could not visit the town where
I lived most of my life. This was more than three years after the
"humanitarian bombing" by U.S.-NATO forces and escalation of
ethnic conflict began in Kosovo on March 24th, 1999.
But it was still too dangerous for me, as a dark-skinned "Madjupi"
(Albanian term connoting "lower than garbage"), to set foot inside of
Kosovo.
Finally, the day arrived (May 2nd, 2002) when I could visit my place
of birth, the place of so many memories from my youth. But that
place--where I grew up with my four brothers and one sister,
cousins, relatives, neighbors, friends--no longer existed. Everything
had been wiped away. The new and renovated houses, villas, gas
stations, motels, all built in the past three years by the triumphant
ethnic Albanians, made Kosovo look like a foreign country to me.
I didn't know what to feel in that moment of returning. Fear,
happiness, anger, sadness?
The paradox that crossed my mind was that all this rebuilding is
being sponsored by international relief agencies and financed by
development and investment companies with such well-known heads
as Dick Cheney and George Soros. Meanwhile the Roma, Serbs, Gorani,
Bosnians, Turks and other minorities in Kosovo are starving! While
most of these international institutions were bragging about "free and
democratic Kosovo," these peoples were forced to abandon their
homes, suffering a "humanitarian" supported ethnic cleansing
that has been virtually invisible to the rest of the world. The ironic
consequence of NATO/US rescue of oppressed Albanians is that they
then became oppressors themselves.
This May, as President of Voice of Roma (VOR), I led a trip to Kosovo
with delegates representing human rights, refugee assistance, and
peace groups from the U.S., Germany, Italy, and Holland. Most
people working in such organizations think that Kosovo is free
now, and that its people are living in harmony and peace. They are
surprised when I inform them that the ethnic minorities in Kosovo
are still fleeing. I wanted them to witness with their own eyes what
is going on there.
The delegates were housed in the Romani communities, south of
Pristina. Each family hosted two or more delegates. The delegates spent
time with and got to know people who had been caught in heavy crossfire
between Serbs and Albanians, suffered from the heavy bombing by
NATO's U.S.-led forces, and experienced discrimination by K-FOR
forces, the U.N. Police, international non-governmental organizations
(NGOs), and Western European foreign policies. The delegates were
appalled by the stories they heard and shocked at the conditions under
which the Kosovo Roma were living.
Since NATO's "peace-keepers" arrived in Kosovo, more than 300,000
ethnic minorities have been "cleansed" from the region by extremist
Albanians. It has been more than a year since the U.N. Interim
Administration in Kosovo (UNMIK) or the Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) released any statements about
human rights abuses of minorities in Kosovo. Surprisingly, such
NGOs as Doctors Without Borders (winner of the Nobel Peace Prize),
the International Red Cross, Oxfam, and many more have failed the
ethnic minorities in Kosovo by not addressing their problems.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are alone in reporting
on minority human rights abuses in Kosovo.
My question is: If NATO's so-called humanitarian bombing was to
stop "ethnic cleansing," why are the same Western powers now so
unwilling to intervene on behalf of the actual ethnic cleansing of
Romani people and other minorities in Kosovo?
The ethnic cleansing of the Roma since U.N. peace-keepers arrived
in June 12th of 1999 has resulted in more than 75% of this population
(over 100,000 Romani people) fleeing Kosovo. Still the media and the
international "humanitarian" community are silent. U.S. and Western
media did not catch any of these events on their radar screens, or
rather
willingly ignored these horrors. (See our report The Current Plight
of the Roma in Kosovo, available from Voice of Roma, P.O. Box 514,
Sebastopol, CA 95473.)
[Foto: Crkvena Vodica village just outside the capital Prishtina.
94 Romani homes were destroyed by Albanians after the 1999 US-NATO
bombings.]
The majority of the Roma who are left in Kosovo (25,000 out of a
prewar population of 150,000) are internal refugees, but they do not
have the official status of refugees. Instead these Roma are labeled
"internally-displaced persons" (IDPs), with fewer recognized rights
than refugees, and are restricted to camps with very poor facilities.
Some Roma do live in Serbian controlled enclaves. No other ethnic
group is in the IDP camps, only Roma. Why is this? Only the Roma
have no safe haven country. Serbs flee to Serbia, Bosnians to Bosnia,
Turks to Turkey, and Gorani (who are Muslim/Slavs) to Macedonia or
Western Europe.
The poorest of the poor, in the IDP camps, the Roma face a remarkable
level of discrimination and oppression that is threatening their lives
and crippling their culture.
Just to give you an idea, the U.N. provides to each of the Roma in IDP
camps a monthly ration of eight kilos (17 pounds) of flour, two onions,
two tomatoes, a half-kilo (one pound) of cheese, and some fruit
(usually rotten). Beyond that, there is only three liters of cooking oil
per family, regardless of family size; no other supplies are available
(interviews with refugees in IDP camps in Kosovo and Macedonia).
If these people are struggling to survive physically, what then happens
to their culture?
For another example, when a U.N. representative was approached by
a VOR representative about providing cooking and drinking water to
Roma in one camp, his reply was, "Oh, the Gypsies know how to take
care of themselves. They're nomads; they've lived all their lives like
that." If the Roma are facing such dismissal from those on whom they
depend for their physical survival, how are they to survive either
physically or culturally?
This deeply-rooted stereotype, that the Roma are uncivilized
wanderers who don't have the same needs as members of "civilized"
societies is contradicted by the facts. In Kosovo, Roma have lived in
houses for over seven hundred years, and most of them have never seen
a wanderer's caravan. The effect of such stereotypes is to dehumanize
the Roma and destroy their cultural infrastructure.
In today's "free" Kosovo, no Rom can move freely; his children cannot
go to school, and cannot speak their mother tongue. Because they had
to leave their homes and now must stay in the camps, most of the Roma
still in Kosovo have not seen nearby family members in more than
three years. That means, among other things, that marriages cannot be
made according to Romani social rules. What happens to a society in
which new families cannot form?
How can we change the situation of Roma, wherever they may happen
to be? What is our responsibility to a people who have been so abused
and ignored for centuries?
Sani Rifati is a Romani activist, writer and lecturer from Kosovo,
now living in Graton, California. He is the President of Voice of Roma,
a non-profit advocacy group working on behalf of Roma in Kosovo
and Romani refugees living throughout Europe. Email:
staff@...
Glossary of Terms:
Rom= one person, (sing.), human being or husband in Romani language.
Roma= Gypsies (pl.)
Romani=Adjective (e.g. Romani language, history, culture, etc?)
Madjupi= Derogatory term in Albanian language for Roma.
Gorani= Ethnic group in Kosovo that are Slav Muslim
2. THE ROMA AND "HUMANITARIAN" ETHNIC CLEANSING IN KOSOVO (Dissident
Voice)
LINKS to documents and news on Kosmet's hell:
Source: UN Security Council - Date: 9 Oct 2002
Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Interim
Administration Mission in Kosovo (S/2002/1126)
http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf/vID/1CCD470704F300FB85256C5600679068?OpenDocument
Source: Council of Europe
THE HUMAN RIGHTS SITUATION in Kosovo-Metohija
http://www.commissioner.coe.int/docs/CommDH(2002)11_E.pdf
U.N. police in Kosovo make record drugs haul (Reuters, Sept 29, 2002)
http://news.serbianunity.net/bydate/2002/September_30/21.html
U.N. police crack down on prostitution, drugs in Kosovo (AP 1/10/02)
http://news.serbianunity.net/bydate/2002/September_30/24.html
Appeal of the expelled Serbs from Kosovo and Metohija, OEA, October 1st
2002
http://news.serbianunity.net/bydate/2002/October_01/5.html
RIA "Novosti": Everything`s Fine in Kosovo? (by Valentin Kunin)
http://www.artel.co.yu/en/izbor/jugoslavija/2002-10-19_2.html
Report: Church deeply hurt by the behavor or the U.S. KFOR
http://www.kosovo.com/rep191002.html
New pressures on Visoki Decani monastery
http://www.kosovo.com/news.html
=== 1 ===
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/20/opinion/20SULL.html
THE NEW YORK TIMES, Sunday, October 20, 2002
Shopping for Sniper Rifles
By STACY SULLIVAN
When a sniper began shooting down people in suburban Maryland and
Virginia earlier this month, followed by possible copycat shootings on
Long Island last weekend, I wondered why it hadn't happened sooner.
For the past three years, I have been doing research for a book on how a
group of Kosovar Albanian émigrés in New York City helped build a
guerrilla army by raising money and buying and shipping high-powered
rifles from the United States to the Balkans. In March 2001, I
accompanied one of the key fund-raisers for the Kosovo Liberation Army
to a gun show in suburban Pennsylvania. Sports utility vehicles with
"Sportsmen for Bush" bumper stickers lined the parking lot. Inside, a
throng of people - mostly young men, but also a surprising number of
families with children - strolled past tables laden with AK-47's, M-16
assault rifles, sniper rifles, handguns, flat and round bullets,
brochures for
the National Rifle Association, silencers, night scopes, knives,
Japanese
swords, muskets, daggers, even a couple of anti-aircraft guns, as well
as
paraphernalia from the Civil War, World War I and World War II.
One gun dealer showed me a .32-caliber Thompson automatic weapon that
shoots 32 rounds in less than 2.5 seconds. Another showed me a
.22-caliber
Bushmaster gun with a silencer that was described as "deadly quiet." The
most impressive gun, however, was the .50-caliber high-powered Barrett
sniper rifle. With the .50-caliber rifle, the dealer told me, a good
marksman can kill a large animal from two miles away and an amateur
could probably shoot a person from a mile away. He said he had armor-
piercing, tracer and incendiary .50-caliber bullets available that could
bring down a helicopter. The rifle was going for about $5,000.
As I looked at the gun, my K.L.A. companion beckoned me over to another
stand where a woman was selling a Barrett knock-off, a .50-caliber
sniper rifle made by Armalite that was selling for just $2,495. The
dealer
told me all I had to do was hand over my driver's license for an "Insta-
Check."
"They call this an Insta-Check, but really it takes about 15 minutes,"
she said, referring to the background check she would have to do. As
long
as I didn't have a criminal record or live in the "People's Republic of
New
York City," so called among gun dealers because it's one of the few
cities
where it is illegal to possess any kind of firearm without a permit, the
gun
would be mine. I told her I did live in New York City, but that my
driver's license was issued in California. In that case, she said, I'd
probably be fine.
The K.L.A. member bought a sniper rifle that day, along with a few other
guns. Those weapons were promptly shipped overseas to Kosovo and
Macedonia, another example of American gun laws inadvertently fueling
foreign conflicts.
Ever since that day at the Pennsylvania gun show, I've wondered how hard
it would be to use one of those high-powered sniper-rifles. Last week,
in
a Times report, a retired New York City police detective and security
executive, Richard Dietl, cleared that up a little. He said it took him
one afternoon to teach his 12-year-old son how to hit a target in the
torso from 200 yards away.
The ease with which one can buy weapons at gun shows has not gone
unnoticed by groups like Al Qaeda, which pointed this out in one of its
training manuals. According to the Violence Policy Center, a gun control
advocacy group, Osama bin Laden's agents in the United States purchased
25 high-powered sniper rifles to use in their war against the Soviets in
Afghanistan in the late 1980's. What would stop them from using the guns
against us at home?
We have no idea whether the suburban sniper on the loose inside the
Beltway is a foreign terrorist. It is clear, however, that our gun laws
not only inadvertently fuel foreign conflicts but also enable terrorists
to purchase guns to launch attacks against people on American soil.
Gun control advocates have called for the creation of a ballistic
imaging system to help law enforcement officers trace ammunition
to the guns used to fire them. However, such a high-tech system
would be of little use to law enforcement if the gunman bought his
weapon more than three months before using it. Federal law mandates
that background checks on gun buyers be kept on record for only 90
days, and Attorney General John Ashcroft has proposed shortening
that time to 24 hours. The ability to trace the sniper's 223-caliber
rifle and examine background-check records on the person who
purchased it would be invaluable to the police investigation. Without
it, I can't help wondering how many more victims there will be.
Stacy Sullivan is the author of the forthcoming "From Brooklyn to Kosovo
with Love and Guns."
letters@...
=== 2 ===
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles/Rifati_Kosovo.htm
The Roma and "Humanitarian" Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo
by Sani Rifati
Dissident Voice, October 13, 2002
I am a Rom (more commonly known as "Gypsy") who was born in
Kosovo, Yugoslavia, and lived in Pristina (the capital of the Kosovo
region) for 27 years. In the summer of 2000, ten years later, I was
only 30 miles away in Macedonia but I could not visit the town where
I lived most of my life. This was more than three years after the
"humanitarian bombing" by U.S.-NATO forces and escalation of
ethnic conflict began in Kosovo on March 24th, 1999.
But it was still too dangerous for me, as a dark-skinned "Madjupi"
(Albanian term connoting "lower than garbage"), to set foot inside of
Kosovo.
Finally, the day arrived (May 2nd, 2002) when I could visit my place
of birth, the place of so many memories from my youth. But that
place--where I grew up with my four brothers and one sister,
cousins, relatives, neighbors, friends--no longer existed. Everything
had been wiped away. The new and renovated houses, villas, gas
stations, motels, all built in the past three years by the triumphant
ethnic Albanians, made Kosovo look like a foreign country to me.
I didn't know what to feel in that moment of returning. Fear,
happiness, anger, sadness?
The paradox that crossed my mind was that all this rebuilding is
being sponsored by international relief agencies and financed by
development and investment companies with such well-known heads
as Dick Cheney and George Soros. Meanwhile the Roma, Serbs, Gorani,
Bosnians, Turks and other minorities in Kosovo are starving! While
most of these international institutions were bragging about "free and
democratic Kosovo," these peoples were forced to abandon their
homes, suffering a "humanitarian" supported ethnic cleansing
that has been virtually invisible to the rest of the world. The ironic
consequence of NATO/US rescue of oppressed Albanians is that they
then became oppressors themselves.
This May, as President of Voice of Roma (VOR), I led a trip to Kosovo
with delegates representing human rights, refugee assistance, and
peace groups from the U.S., Germany, Italy, and Holland. Most
people working in such organizations think that Kosovo is free
now, and that its people are living in harmony and peace. They are
surprised when I inform them that the ethnic minorities in Kosovo
are still fleeing. I wanted them to witness with their own eyes what
is going on there.
The delegates were housed in the Romani communities, south of
Pristina. Each family hosted two or more delegates. The delegates spent
time with and got to know people who had been caught in heavy crossfire
between Serbs and Albanians, suffered from the heavy bombing by
NATO's U.S.-led forces, and experienced discrimination by K-FOR
forces, the U.N. Police, international non-governmental organizations
(NGOs), and Western European foreign policies. The delegates were
appalled by the stories they heard and shocked at the conditions under
which the Kosovo Roma were living.
Since NATO's "peace-keepers" arrived in Kosovo, more than 300,000
ethnic minorities have been "cleansed" from the region by extremist
Albanians. It has been more than a year since the U.N. Interim
Administration in Kosovo (UNMIK) or the Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) released any statements about
human rights abuses of minorities in Kosovo. Surprisingly, such
NGOs as Doctors Without Borders (winner of the Nobel Peace Prize),
the International Red Cross, Oxfam, and many more have failed the
ethnic minorities in Kosovo by not addressing their problems.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are alone in reporting
on minority human rights abuses in Kosovo.
My question is: If NATO's so-called humanitarian bombing was to
stop "ethnic cleansing," why are the same Western powers now so
unwilling to intervene on behalf of the actual ethnic cleansing of
Romani people and other minorities in Kosovo?
The ethnic cleansing of the Roma since U.N. peace-keepers arrived
in June 12th of 1999 has resulted in more than 75% of this population
(over 100,000 Romani people) fleeing Kosovo. Still the media and the
international "humanitarian" community are silent. U.S. and Western
media did not catch any of these events on their radar screens, or
rather
willingly ignored these horrors. (See our report The Current Plight
of the Roma in Kosovo, available from Voice of Roma, P.O. Box 514,
Sebastopol, CA 95473.)
[Foto: Crkvena Vodica village just outside the capital Prishtina.
94 Romani homes were destroyed by Albanians after the 1999 US-NATO
bombings.]
The majority of the Roma who are left in Kosovo (25,000 out of a
prewar population of 150,000) are internal refugees, but they do not
have the official status of refugees. Instead these Roma are labeled
"internally-displaced persons" (IDPs), with fewer recognized rights
than refugees, and are restricted to camps with very poor facilities.
Some Roma do live in Serbian controlled enclaves. No other ethnic
group is in the IDP camps, only Roma. Why is this? Only the Roma
have no safe haven country. Serbs flee to Serbia, Bosnians to Bosnia,
Turks to Turkey, and Gorani (who are Muslim/Slavs) to Macedonia or
Western Europe.
The poorest of the poor, in the IDP camps, the Roma face a remarkable
level of discrimination and oppression that is threatening their lives
and crippling their culture.
Just to give you an idea, the U.N. provides to each of the Roma in IDP
camps a monthly ration of eight kilos (17 pounds) of flour, two onions,
two tomatoes, a half-kilo (one pound) of cheese, and some fruit
(usually rotten). Beyond that, there is only three liters of cooking oil
per family, regardless of family size; no other supplies are available
(interviews with refugees in IDP camps in Kosovo and Macedonia).
If these people are struggling to survive physically, what then happens
to their culture?
For another example, when a U.N. representative was approached by
a VOR representative about providing cooking and drinking water to
Roma in one camp, his reply was, "Oh, the Gypsies know how to take
care of themselves. They're nomads; they've lived all their lives like
that." If the Roma are facing such dismissal from those on whom they
depend for their physical survival, how are they to survive either
physically or culturally?
This deeply-rooted stereotype, that the Roma are uncivilized
wanderers who don't have the same needs as members of "civilized"
societies is contradicted by the facts. In Kosovo, Roma have lived in
houses for over seven hundred years, and most of them have never seen
a wanderer's caravan. The effect of such stereotypes is to dehumanize
the Roma and destroy their cultural infrastructure.
In today's "free" Kosovo, no Rom can move freely; his children cannot
go to school, and cannot speak their mother tongue. Because they had
to leave their homes and now must stay in the camps, most of the Roma
still in Kosovo have not seen nearby family members in more than
three years. That means, among other things, that marriages cannot be
made according to Romani social rules. What happens to a society in
which new families cannot form?
How can we change the situation of Roma, wherever they may happen
to be? What is our responsibility to a people who have been so abused
and ignored for centuries?
Sani Rifati is a Romani activist, writer and lecturer from Kosovo,
now living in Graton, California. He is the President of Voice of Roma,
a non-profit advocacy group working on behalf of Roma in Kosovo
and Romani refugees living throughout Europe. Email:
staff@...
Glossary of Terms:
Rom= one person, (sing.), human being or husband in Romani language.
Roma= Gypsies (pl.)
Romani=Adjective (e.g. Romani language, history, culture, etc?)
Madjupi= Derogatory term in Albanian language for Roma.
Gorani= Ethnic group in Kosovo that are Slav Muslim