Picturing War: Fleeing Roma Find Refuge at Montenegro Tent Camp

In the spring of 1999, prominent Montenegrin photojournalist Stevo Vasiljevic was covering the impact of NATO's airstrikes against Yugoslavia during the Western military alliance's 78-day bombing campaign.

At that point, Vasiljevic, who had been a photojournalist since 1997 and was working for international agencies and Montenegrin media, was spending every day covering the NATO bombing campaign.

"In the early dawn we went to the mountains around the border with Kosovo and reported on the refugees fleeing the war. In the afternoon, we reported on the protests against the NATO airstrikes and in the evening, we were shooting bombs and the consequences of the bombing," Vasiljevic told BIRN in an interview.

NATO launched its airstrikes to force Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to accept the terms of an agreement to end his military campaign against the guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which involved widespread ethnic cleansing.

As Montenegro was part of Yugoslavia at the time, military camps in the country were bombed by NATO. The deadliest attack happened on April 18, 1999. in the northern village of Murino, when six people, including children, were killed when NATO missiles hit a bridge in northern village Murino.

According to the Montenegrin Commissariat for Refugees and Displaced Persons, over several months in 1999 more than 100,000 people from Kosovo fled to Montenegro, mostly ethnic Albanians.

But after the NATO air strikes were over and Milosevic pulled his forces out, around 11,000 Serbs, Bosniaks and Roma refugees also fled from Kosovo to Montenegro, fearing reprisals from the Kosovo Albanians who tended to view them as pro-Serbian. The Roma refugees were settled in the Vrela Ribnicka district in the...