Balkanalysis.com

Counterpoint: More than Meets the Eye in Vojvodina

In the spirit of democratic debate, we are pleased to offer this counterpoint to Lбszlу Szentesi Zцldi’s recent article on the Hungarian minority in Vojvodina, by none other than Nebojsa Malic.

An ill wind blows in Serbia’s northern province, says Lбszlу Szentesi Zцldi, reporting that the Hungarian population in Vojvodina is complaining about recent violence they say is ethnically motivated.Budapest has also expressed concern, to the point of threatening to create difficulties for Serbia in its desired rapprochement with the EU. Meanwhile, on the American side of the Atlantic, some familiar names have taken up the “Hungarian cause.”

What exactly is going on in the northern Serbian province, which is home to over 300,000 hard-working, peaceful and tolerant ethnic Hungarians, among others?

Budapest media and Zцldi blame Serbs displaced from Bosnia and Croatia, asserting that they “do not believe in peaceful solutions between the local communities.” Setting aside the question that the very textbook definition of xenophobia is to blame the outsiders, and assuming for the sake of argument that western Serbs are truly to blame, one must ask why they have waited so long?

The first refugees from what is today Croatia started arriving in 1990-91, joined by their brethren from what is today Bosnia from 1992-95. So the most recent refugees from the west have lived in Vojvodina for at least nine years without attacking Hungarians. What could have caused them to start now? Obviously, this explanation is somewhat strained.

Not exactly cited as a cause, but certainly included as an important bit of background, is the allegation that Vojvodina was “stripped” of autonomy in 1989, in the same way as Kosovo. The Official History, lodged in the minds of world public opinion through endless repetition, holds that Kosovo was illegally deprived of its constitutional autonomy by the evil Communist regime of Slobodan Milosevic, which is the underlying cause of Albanian unrest in that province. Not surprisingly, the Official History is wrong: Albanians have had designs on Kosovo since at least 1878, for example. Furthermore, the amendments to the Serbian constitution in 1989 were entirely legal, and as legitimate as any Communist legislation – including the 1974 Constitution that created the paradoxical status of Vojvodina and Kosovo in the first place. One problem with blaming this for the recently claimed violence is that 1989 was 15 years ago. So again, why would there be a spike in the violence now?

In 1999, Hungary – having just joined NATO – fully supported the Alliance’s attack on Serbia on behalf of the KLA, allowing NATO bombers to use its airbases and at one point even being considered as a launching pad for the ground invasion. Yet there were few reports of anti-Hungarian violence, if any. Vojvodina’s Hungarians suffered as much as anyone under NATO’s bombs that wrecked bridges, power and water lines in a province about as far from Kosovo as any part of Serbia could be.

So the unanswered – and unasked, really – question is: why?

The “who” is of course assumed to be ethnic Serbs. But is that really the case?

For example, the attack in Temerin that Zцldi mentions, where five Hungarian youths assaulted a Serb, was withheld from the public for several days, out of fear that it might spark ethnic violence. It is therefore extremely unfair to say the “…Serbian press used this attack as the first sign of Hungarian anger against the Serbs, but failed to mention the previous attacks carried out against local Hungarians.” It also, indirectly, asserts a causality between attacks; yet both the Temerin attackers and the victim are strenuously denying the attack was ethnically motivated. It may have been – but so far at least, the Serbs are refraining from jumping to conclusions. It is too easy to see a pattern of persecution if there is an interest – especially political – that seeks to exploit it. But what sort of interest could that be?

It is laughable to suggest that the current government in Serbia stands to benefit from ethnic violence. But some other people could.

For example, we are not reminded that Joszef Kasza, the Hungarian politician mentioned in Mr. Zцldi’s article, was a major figure in the DOS regime that was unceremoniously dumped at the polls last year. Having failed as a “democratic reformer,” Kasza can thus reinvent himself as a defender of an “endangered minority.” This is not to say Kasza is staging the attacks, just spinning events a certain way.

Nenad Canak, speaker of the Vojvodina Assembly, is another former DOS leader and a flamboyant advocate of Vojvodina “autonomy” that often crosses the line into separatism. He is also a bitter enemy of the present government, and a political ally of Kasza’s. Canak’s separatist movement has sought to not only restore the 1974 status of Vojvodina, but to distance it from Serbia as much as possible. He models his actions after Milo Djukanovic, leader of the Montenegro separatists (who are generously funded by the US), and his public appearances after Kosovo Albanian separatist leader Ibrahim Rugova (down to the scarf that symbolizes “a noose of oppression” and all). He is also fond of making sensationalist proclamations that lack even the most tenuous relationship with the truth.

Having styled himself an intractable enemy of “Serbian nationalism” – in reality, opposing Serbian patriotism – Canak is in an ideal position to exploit allegations of ethnic violence.

Now, it is very important to understand that demands for autonomous status with the trappings of statehood are bound to rankle most Serbians. Unity is a very important political value in Serbia, probably dating back to popular resentment of squabbles between the nobility that doomed the medieval Serbian state.

Modern Serbia (1804-1945) has always been organized around a central government. But in post-modern Serbia, ruled by Communists since 1945, division became the highest political value: Yugoslavia was federalized, as was Serbia itself, with the creation of Vojvodina and Kosovo as autonomous political entities. When in 1991 the nascent EU decided to recognize Communist-drawn borders of federal republics as international boundaries, the resulting disenfranchisement of some 2 million Serbs caused the conflicts in today’s Croatia and Bosnia. Albanian separatists in Kosovo have since claimed that the 1974 Constitution entitles them to secession as well; some of their powerful partisans in the West have supported this contention – notably Representative Tom Lantos, whose House Resolution supporting the independence of “Kosova” (HR 11, 7 January 2003) specifically lists this argument.

So imagine the surprise, or lack thereof, that Lantos is at the forefront of the recent effort in the US Congress to “focus the attention of American policy-makers on the situation in Vojvodina.” Mr. Zцldi does not mention him, however, or that Lantos’s angry letter to Serbian Prime Minister Kostunica was not endorsed by the congressional Hungarian-American Caucus.

It is surprising and disturbing that Budapest is using its EU membership to bully Serbia about the supposed ethnic violence that is neither properly documented nor adequately explained. After a decade of demonization in the international media, Serbs may seem an easy target for neighbors wishing to score political points and maybe even revive old territorial agendas. Historical precedents in Hungary’s case are not encouraging. After all, three times over the course of the 20^th century Hungary has sided with Imperial powers in their attacks on Serbia: 1914, 1941, and 1999.

So yes, there is an ill wind over Vojvodina, but there is more to it than meets the eye. The answer to the timing of the alleged ethnic attacks most likely lies in the aspirations of Democratic US policymakers seeking a return to power, and a continuation of their Balkan agenda through the fragmentation of Serbia. Somebody is trying to create an issue here, and given the cast of characters in Novi Sad as well as Washington, the Hungarians of Vojvodina may be in a very real danger – of being used as pawns of the Empire, that is.