A Dual Challenge for the Year of Equal Opportunities for All: Roms in the Western Balkans
Publisher: ECMI Volume: 23 pages, pdf Description: Since their arrival in Europe roughly 1,000 years ago, Roms have almost always (if not always) lived worse off than the surrounding non-Romani population. Notwithstanding considerable variation in the degree to which Roms are integrated in individual states, Roms’ overall situation throughout the region suggests broad continuity with their past. Since the mid-1990s, there has been a substantial increase in the number of initiatives for the ostensible purpose of integrating Romani populations in Central and Eastern Europe. Whereas in much of the region anti-discrimination policies in general and strategies for the integration of Roms in particular were drafted in response to the prospect of integration into the European Union, the EU seems thus far to have played a less important role in this regard in the Western Balkans (i.e., Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia), where accession often seems at best a distant beacon.