Mitrovica’s toxic camps are home to a demonised people
November 3, 2009 – 9:34 amPrinted Edition of the Irish Times
AS KOSOVO’S Albanians and Serbs move from violent conflict into a poisonous and paralysing stand-off, a third community in this fledgling state is suffering most of all, writes DANIEL McLAUGHLIN in Mitrovica
The Roma of Kosovo are demonised by its 90 per cent Albanian majority and at best tolerated, often resented, by the Serbs who stayed here after a 1998-1999 war broke Belgrade’s hold on the region and ultimately led to the independence that they vow never to accept.
All but about 20,000 of the 200,000 Roma who lived in pre-war Kosovo have left, driven out by Albanian gangs who accused them of collaboration with the Serbs. Most that remain live in the Serb stronghold of northern Kosovo but, wherever they reside, the Roma are at the back of the queue for funds and services provided by the cash-strapped Kosovo and Serb governments.
The picture is bleak for all the Kosovo Roma, but it is bleakest of all in the toxic camps of Mitrovica.
On the northern side of this tense, ethnically divided town are the settlements of Cesmin Lug and Osterode, huddled among the black slag heaps and rusting machinery of the Trepca lead mine.
These camps are home to about 500 people, and they are situated in what is probably the most heavily polluted place in all of former Yugoslavia.
The Roma fled to northern Mitrovica when their Mahala district on the southern side of the Ibar river was razed to the ground by Albanian mobs at the end of the war.
The United Nations established three emergency camps for the 8,000 fleeing Roma on some of the most contaminated territory of a town where the air, soil and water are all blighted by its past as a mining and smelting centre for southern Yugoslavia.
Two of the camps were finally closed in 2006 and their residents moved to a nearby former French army base called Osterode. A third camp established in 1999, Cesmin Lug, is still full of life – and lead – to this day.
In Osterode, people live in long metal cabins arranged on a vast expanse of concrete which, because it does not absorb the lead in the air, is considered its strongest attraction. Sanitation is basic and electricity intermittent, and residents fire up smoky old wood-burning stoves when the power fails.
Cesmin Lug is even more primitive and more dangerous. Clinging to a disused railway line with a view towards a towering black slag heap, it is a shanty of listing wooden and metal huts built on mud that is full of the lead and other heavy metals that gave Mitrovica its economic rationale.
“We’ve all got problems with lead in our blood, from the babies to the oldest people,” said Chun Hajdini (50), leaning on the door frame of his little home in Cesmin Lug. “Since 1999 things have been terrible for the Roma in Kosovo. We are the poorest people here. I was born in the Mahala and had a big house there, but it was destroyed. The people here lost everything when the Mahala was burned down.”
The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the World Health Organisation and Human Rights Watch are among those calling for the camps to be closed and the Roma relocated. But a situation that the UN helped create by building the camps in this poisonous area, and failed to resolve during nine years running Kosovo, is now a long way down the priority list of Pristina, Belgrade and an international community that is scaling back its involvement here.
One project that could get the Roma out of the camps is being stymied by Kosovo’s economic woes, fears of a return to violence and, critics say, a lack of domestic and international commitment.
Groups including the Danish Refugee Council – whose project is partly funded by Irish Aid – have built new housing in the Mahala that is now home to about 100 Roma families. But a dearth of jobs, problems accessing the ethnic-Albanian health and education systems, and worries that strong discrimination could lead to a new attack on the district, are all discouraging Roma from going back.
“Those who have gone back say there is no work and it’s hard to get food for their kids. At least here in northern Mitrovica we can collect metal and trade with the Serbs, and find odd jobs,” said Habib, a community leader in the Osterode camp.
“And we are scared. People were killed in riots in 2004 that started in Mitrovica. It doesn’t seem safe to go back to the Mahala yet.” Having failed to ensure the closure of the camps, western states may be about to dump another problem on their doorstep.
Germany intends to send some 14,000 Kosovo refugees – including 10,000 Roma – back to Kosovo over the next decade, and other EU members are expected to follow suit.
Berlin says it will not repatriate more than 2,500 people a year.
Aid workers fully expect many of these refugees to turn up at the lead-blighted camps where their relatives live, compounding what the OSCE this year called “one of the biggest medical crises in the region”.
“The West will be forcing people back from a healthy environment into a terribly unhealthy one, and compounding all the problems here of unemployment, bad hygiene and so on,” said Igor Zlatkovic, a camp officer for the Kosovo Agency for Advocacy and Development.
“We are totally in the dark about what EU countries are planning. I have nightmares of buses full of Roma returnees turning up at the camp gates. We couldn’t turn them away. But we would have to extend the camps and then people could be stuck here forever.”
