Romanies Leaving Baranja

AIM Zagreb, 31 August, 1999

"Whatever regime comes to power, it strikes against the Gypsies. It was best for us, brother, while Tito walked on this earth, and after that, it is all the same to us whoever comes", says 34-year old Zoran Mitrovic from the village of Torjanci in Baranja, and then gives arguments for his opinion: "The war started and the Serb regime came and immediately started to call up. The Serbs did not ask if you want to go to war or not, you had to or you were dead. If you weren't fit to carry a gun, you could dig, and then you dug and they kept a gun pointed at your back. And then, be a hero and refuse to dig! So much for us being Chetniks".

After the Serb regime from Krajina collapsed in Baranja, the Croatian legal order moved in and from the very first moment all those who had remained to live under Serb rule were classified in the category of the undesirable. And the people soon understood: under pressure and threats of Croat returnees, Baranja was first left by the Serbs, and then the local Romanies followed suit. Before the latest war in Baranja, about ten thousand Romanies lived there, and this number was not reduced during the rule of the Serb Krajina; when Croatian authorities came here, a large number of the Romanies started gathering the little belongings they had and leaving. Most frequently they left to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and places in it such as Novi Sad, Sombor or Bajmok, but it is also a fact that nowadays there are Romanies from Baranja - who are mostly citizens of Croatia - to be found from Canada to Australia. There are about two and half thousand of them in Baranja at the moment, and this figure is irretrievably diminishing every day. And somehow it seems that the current Croatian regime will manage to do what - despite the manifested effort - no previous regime has ever done: uproot the Romanies from Baranja.

The Romanies are the natives of Baranja: they came here from Romania seven centuries ago and in time became the known trough-makers, in other words their skilled hands could make out of wood almost anything a man could think of. Over the centuries the Romanies have remained faithful to wood and until these bad times came they had earned their living by thinning the rich forests of Baranja. Apart from the forest they remained loyal to their language which is closest to Romanian but with elements of Croatian and Serbian, they remained loyal to their customs and tradition, but accepted the language and the culture of the country they live in. They say that in the year when the war began there were no illiterate among the local Romanies.

"Not long ago I was going by the ferry across the Drava to Belisce and everything was fine. Then in the evening I was going back to the village by ferry and almost got killed", says 28-year old Miroslav Bogdan from Torjanci, a village which is in the triangle between the Drava, the Danube and the Hungarian border. Miroslav is one of the odd hundred Romanies still living in Torjanci, and that is the only reason why he almost got killed.

"We were sitting, my nephew Boro, his little son and I, and then policeman Marko Katic from Petrovo Selo in Baranja came up to us and started cursing my nephew's Chetnik and Gypsy mother and said that Boro had killed his father. He hit Boro on the face, but he was silent and did not resist. I was also silent, only the little one cried and repeated 'don't hurt my daddy'. Katic did not listen, but went on hitting him, and we did not dare do anything, he was in uniform and had a gun at his belt. Then the ferry stopped and Boro ran away, the policeman followed me. He caught me and started beating me up, but it was the worst when he took out his gun and flicked the safety off. He put it against my head and asked 'do you want me to kill you now'. I said 'kill me, man, if I have done you any wrong', and he just cursed my gypsy mother and God, then Chetnik mother and God. In the end he said he would not kill me but that next time I would not get away. I lodged an appeal against Katic, but nothing happened to him", Miroslav Bogdan ends his story.

This story is, in fact, just a tiny illustration from a big album of atrocities the Romanies in Baranja are experiencing every day. This album contains explosives planted in their homes, beating up and humiliation, which have become customary among the Croats in this region, banning Romanies to pass through certain parts, Romany children dying of starvation and simple pneumonia. The story goes that not long ago a ten-month old baby died in Darda because it had nothing to eat; indeed, it had something to eat, but obviously the odd mixture of flour and water that its mother was feeding it with for months was not sufficient for the baby. They say that the mother tried to find help everywhere but they did not give her baby food in any of the humanitarian organisations. A year ago, a twelve-year old girl died of pneumonia in Vardarac.

The main sin of the Romanies is that they did not leave their homes at the time of the Krajina regime, and the returnees add to this stories that the Romanies were the best warriors in the Serb army, and that they were especially ardent in plundering the abandoned Croat homes.

"The returnees say that the Romanies have robbed their homes, and we say that they should come and see in our houses and if they find a single stollen thing they can kill us all. If we had been guilty of anything, would we have stayed?" wonders Branko Petrovic, president of the Association of the Romanies of Baranja. "Where could we have gone when the war started? You cannot be buried alive, and wherever you may have gone you would be homesick for Baranja and your home. And I must be sincere with you, the Romanies felt as Yugoslavs here, and I shall be sincere with you again, in 1991 we got scared of the Croat regime in which we recognised continuation of the Ustasha regime which slaughtered Romanies from this region by the thousands. We believed that it would be better to stay in some kind of Yugoslavia".

"Now, look here: we were allegedly Chetniks, while real Chetniks thought we were Ustashas because we, the Romanies from Torjanci, are Catholics. The Romanies in Baranja have joined whatever Church was more influential in their village, so over here we have become Catholics. Since the Croats returned to the village, the priest would not christen our children any more, so we have to ask the priest in Osijek to do it. He can't stop us from coming to church, but he humiliates us by saying at mass 'come closer, my Gypsies'. Relatives who have gone to Yugoslavia also consider us Ustashas. Just a few days ago I met my best men who had gone there and he asked me to sing him an Ustasha song. For the ones we are Ustashas and for the others we are Chetniks", says Vlado Palko and his words are confirmed by Branko Petrovic who says that neither the Serbs nor the Croats are aware that a Romany can be neither a Chetnik nor an Ustasha.

"A Romany is a man who likes singing and dancing, we are joyful people and freedom is most important for us. And this is no freedom for the Romanies. Wherever you go, it is risky and you don't know what fool you may run into and whether you will get beaten up. When Romanies from Torjanci ride bicycles to Beli Manastir which is thirty kilometres away, they don't dare pass through Baranjsko Petrovo Selo, because everybody knows that a Romany can pass through that village only if he previously gets beaten up by Croat returnees or if he is bitten by their dogs. People don't dare go to the village store because they will be beaten up there. They don't dare say 'hello' to a returnee, because he will spit them in the face", says Petrovic.

Not long ago a small Romany girl fell off the attic and broke her arm in Torjanci, and since there is no telephone in the houses of the Romanies there, her father set out seeking help around the village. Whatever door he knocked at the owners sent him away, and he managed to find salvation only in the nearby Serb village called Novo Nevesinje. The Romanies say that the local Serbs - since the Croat athorities came - do not persecute them and even employ them. Now they are in the same situation: returnees wish the ones and the others would disappear into thin air.

"I don't want to offend anybody and say that all returnees hate us and hunt us down, the worst are those who were bums before the war and had nothing, and now they roam around the village all day long telling stories about what they used to have and what the Gypsies have stollen from them. It's even worse that we know that these scoundrels have the power and that nobody can do anything to them. They have guns and uniforms, and we are not stupid to go against guns. Romanies respect the authorities, but we can no longer stand it: they won't let you go to the store, they won't let you go to the pub, they won't let you ride your bicycle around the village, they won't let you work... As if we had shot at God himself", says Zoran Mitrovic.

About ten days ago twenty-year old Romany Nikola Mihajlovic from the village of Vardarci in Baranja went with two friends to steal fish from the nearby fish-pond. The police caught them and the next day he could read his name in the black chronicle of Glas Slavonije.

"Yes we were stealing, but we are forced to steal because we have no means to support ourselves. They did not write in the newspapers what the police did to us when they arrested us: first they hand-cuffed us, told us to lie down on the grass and then started to kick us. They hit us at random with whatever they got hold of", says Nikola. However, the cause of nightmares of all hundred odd Romanies in Vardarac is not so much the police as the demobilised defender and returnee Josip Ciprijanovic. They say that not a day passes without his touring all the Romany houses cursing and threatening them, drunk, with the gun in his hand. In the yards of the Romanies in Vardarac a few bombs have exploded since the beginning of this year, the police came and looked around, the perpetrator has never been found, but the people believe that this was also Ciprijanovic's deed. People also say that a policeman known as Zoltika often comes with Ciprijanovic and this is probably one of the reasons why the police does not react to attacks of the bullies from Vardarci.

"We cannot live here any more. We will all pack up and leave", says Petar Djurdjevic from Darda, village where until three of four years ago two thousand Romanies had lived, while nowadays there are almost half less of them. This is, among other, the result of slogans: "Gypsies, Go Away!" which stood written on many walls and fences in Darda for months. "We could stand anything, if it were not for people beating us and spitting on us. They need not talk with us, as long as they do us no harm. As it is, we will not endure here much longer", says Djurdjevic.

"It is the hardest for the first hundred years", Branko Petrovic concludes the conversation.

IVICA DJIKIC