Samka Ibraimovski – from the Roma PCER party – denounced the conduct of the census and said that he will organize a separate census for the Roma only. A similar announcement also came from the Serb DPSM party. Roma claim that their numbers were greatly reduced in favor of the Albanian community.

This census is a sham and we don’t recognize it. The organizers should be held criminally responsible. We Roma have a large birth rate, but according to the data from the census, it seems that we had no births at all. We will complain to the foreign embassies, to Brussels and Washington, and we will begin our own operation to prove that the census is falsified. We will show that the Roma are realistically around 7 percent of the total population adn the third largest community. We are disastrously defrauded, Ibraimovski said.

The Roma were put at 2,53 percent of the population (about 46,000), down from 53,800 in the 2002 census.