William Penn Life, 1999 (34. évfolyam, 2-12. szám)
1999-06-01 / 6. szám
By Uli Schmetzer BUDAPEST, Hungary (Reuters) - On the walls of homes and public buildings in the Yugoslav province of Vojvodina, the slogans are ominous: "Hungarians: Your God is dead and doesn't care for you any more." Just in case the message left any doubts for ethnic Hungarians, who are predominantly Roman Catholics, their church in Subotica was bombed this April, and anonymous phone calls became more explicit: "Get out!" The handwriting is literally on the wall for the 350,000 Hungarians whose roots in fertile Vojvodina often go back 1,000 years. They were the farmers of what was once the breadbasket of the Kingdom of Hungary and is now the breadbasket of Serbia. For years, Vojvodina's Hungarian minority feared it was the next target for what the Democratic Community of Hungarians in Vojvodina described in a recent statement as a "sinister plan for the final solution of purging Vojvodina of its non-Serb ethnic population." "The wall messages are very clear," said József Kasza, the mayor of Subotica. "What our Serb Orthodox neighbors are telling us is to get out. If our God is dead, no one will protect us. It's an unmistakable and a frightening message." Message Received In the wake of the Croatian and Bosnian wars, a quiet Serb campaign has already "encouraged" 50,000 ethnic Hungarians in Vojvodina to leave, mainly to Hungary. Many of those who left say they were forced to go at gunpoint, or after beatings or constant intimidation, according to reports by Human Rights Watch, a monitoring organization. Once a majority, Vojvodina's Hungarians still constituted 50 percent of the population at the end of World War II. Today, only 17 percent of the 2 million people in Vojvodina are ethnic Hungarians in a region that was part of the Kingdom of Hungary until 1920, when the Western powers transferred it to Serbia. When Ferenc Kisimre, 48, a writer fled to Hungary eight years ago to keep his son out of the Serbian army, the penalty for running away from the draft was a jail sentence. Today ethnic Hungarians who dodge the draft and refuse to fight in Kosovo face death by firing squad, he said. "I did not want to fight Croatians in those days. We had a good relation with our Croatian neighbors. And I did not want my young son to be drafted. So we fled and left everything behind, our home, our furniture, all our possessions," Kisimre recalled at his new home in the border town of Szeged, Hungary. Serb Occupation A year ago he went back to Subotica for the first time, to bury his mother. "The apartment we owned was occupied by a Serb family. It's like that everywhere. The Serbs occupy all the homes of Hungarians who left. Few of us managed to sell our homes, and if people did they received about 10 percent of their real value. I never sold," he said. Some 150,000 Serbs, nearly half of all Serbs displaced by the Bosnian and Croatian wars, were settled in Vojvodina in recent years. As that happened, the atmosphere became increasingly hostile to ethnic Hun-The Official Line Here’s what the Ministry of Information of the Republic of Serbia says about minority rights and status in Vojvodina: “The members of national minorities and ethnic groups in Vojvodina have the same rights and freedom as the members of the Serbian people who make up the majority. “According to the constitution and law, the citizens are equal in their rights and duties, and they are equally entitled to protection before the state and other bodies regardless of their nationality, confession, political or any other orientation, or personal characteristics. “Beside the individual rights and freedom which are granted to all citizens of the Republic of Serbia, the members of the national minorities and ethnic groups have the internationally acknowledged collective rights. Those rights, guaranteed by the state, protect the preservation of their national identity, and they are carried out fully in Vojvodina. 1. The right to use one’s language and alphabet. 2. The right to education in one’s mother tongue. 3. The right to be informed in one’s mother tongue. 4. The right and freedom to express one’s national culture. “In the Province of Vojvodina exists a special Administrative body dedicated to monitoring and administering minority rights, and the Council which deals with the issues of the rights of the national minorities and ethnic groups founded by the Executive Council of Vojvodina.” (Source: Srbija-lnfo. See “Vojvodina Links" on Page 10) William Pen tile, June 1999 7
