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GYPSIES have retreated into camps, encircled by stone-throwing Albanians seeking summary justice for crimes real and imagined committed during the Kosovo war.
With little hope of returning to mainstream society or escaping to a third country, they say that the Kosovo Liberation Army wants to expel them forever. Ahmet Greku, 47, a father of seven, showed scars on the back of his head inflicted, he said, during detention in a "KLA prison" set up alongside British bases in Kosovo.
He said: "First, five men came to my house and said I was a thief. I said 'come in' and they said that everything I had was theirs. Then, they said I carried away Albanian corpses during the war." Mr Greku lives with his family as one of 1,400 gypsies in a camp guarded by British troops a few miles from Pristina.
Nato built the camp in a pine forest and surrounded it with barbed wire covered in plastic sheeting. Albanians have stripped away the sheeting so that they have a better view of the gypsies as they taunt and pelt them. Faruk Muja, 18, sits next to his mother, Lemi, on a log and contemplates the past "good life" of a beggar.
He said: "Then, when Nato started bombing, the Serbs grabbed me and stuck a gun to my head and ordered me to load Albanian televisions and furniture on to trucks. They whipped me black and blue." Mr Muja said he worked with three other gypsies, digging trenches and graves. When the war ended, uniformed Albanians came to his house and expelled him.
Western officials say that most of the 50,000-strong Kosovo gypsy population is innocent of crimes during the war and has become a scapegoat for the Albanians.
Ron Redmond, an American spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency in Pristina, said: "There is little doubt that some of these gypsies have been involved in wrongdoing and now the dilemma is how to divide them out. Most of them are falsely accused."