Romani people in Serbia in the context of "Preševo"

The Kragujevac massacre was the mass murder of between 2,778 and 2,794 mostly Serb men and boys in Kragujevac by German soldiers on 21 October 1941. It occurred in the German-occupied territory of Serbia during World War II, and came as a reprisal for insurgent attacks in the Gornji Milanovac district that resulted in the deaths of ten German soldiers and the wounding of 26 others. The number of hostages to be shot was calculated as a ratio of 100 hostages executed for every German soldier killed and 50 hostages executed for every German soldier wounded, a formula devised by Adolf Hitler with the intent of suppressing anti-Nazi resistance in Eastern Europe.

After a punitive operation was conducted in the surrounding villages, during which over 400 males were shot and four villages burned down, another 70 male Jews and communists who had been arrested in Kragujevac were killed. Simultaneously, males between the ages of 16 and 60, including high school students, were assembled by German troops and local collaborators, and the victims were selected from amongst them. The selected males were then marched to fields outside the city, shot with heavy machine guns, and their bodies buried in mass graves. Contemporary German military records indicate that 2,300 hostages were shot. After the war, inflated estimates ranged as high as 7,000 deaths, but German and Serbian scholars have now agreed on the figure of nearly 2,800 killed, including 144 high school students. As well as Serbs, massacre victims included Jews, Romani people, Muslims, Macedonians, Slovenes, and members of other nationalities.

The Kalderash are a subgroup of the Romani people. They were traditionally coppersmiths and metal workers and speak a number of Romani dialects grouped together under the term Kalderash Romani, a sub-group of Vlax Romani.

The Kalderash of the Balkans and Central Europe, in addition to the Gitanos and Manouche/Sinti, are seen as one of the three main confederations (Romani: natsiya) of Romani people in Europe by certain ethnographers. The Kalderash are recognized as the most numerous confederation of the three. Each main confederation is further split up into two or more subgroups (Romani: vitsa) based on a combination of factors such as occupation, ancestry, or territorial origin. Although originally referring to a specific vitsa of traditional coppersmiths, the name Kalderash is now applied to several Vlax-Speaking Roma groups. Because of this, significant differences in speech and culture can be seen in Western and Eastern Kalderash populations; as evidenced in the differences between the eastern Kalderash of Russia and the western Kalderash of Serbia. Certain scholars have suggested a connection between occupational Romani subgroups and the Caste System of India; with the Kalderash being described as an ancestral stock of the Lohar caste.

Bosniaks are a recognized ethnic minority in Serbia. According to data from the 2022 census, the population of ethnic Bosniaks in Serbia is 153,801, constituting 2.3% of the total population, thus being the third-largest ethnic group in the country, after Serbs and Hungarians (the largest ethnic minority in Serbia). The vast majority of Bosniaks live in the southwestern part of the country, bordering Montenegro and Kosovo, in the region historically known as Sandžak, and are therefore colloquially referred to as Sandžaklije. Before the 1990s, the majority of the Bosniaks in Serbia self-identified as ethnic Muslims.

Bosniaks make up the basis of the Muslim community in Serbia; some 55% of all Muslims in Serbia are ethnic Bosniaks, while the rest are ethnic Albanians and Romani people.