Once a People, Now a Minority

Citizen S.B. does not hide behind the initials because he is a minor. He is a Croat who lives in Belgrade. Asked to talk about the position of Croats in Serbia, S.B. nodded his head reluctantly and then said: "I can't". He then explained that he had two reasons to keep quiet. First, his relatives in Croatia; secondly, his family in Belgrade. First: problems his relatives living in Croatia might run into if it was somehow learned there that he had commended the Belgrade environment. Secondly, trouble he might run into in Belgrade if he objected to the Belgrade environment. The position of our interlocutor not-to-be is largely typical.

On the eve of the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, in Serbia there lived 115 thousand people who called themselves Croats. In the 1991 population census they, together with five other nations, had the status of a constituent people. When the country fell apart, that same census year, in Serbia and Montenegro they became a national minority overnight.

Apart from this status which is necessarily a disadvantage in the Balkans, their condition is aggravated also by the fact that the majority people - within the context of the latest war - sees them as enemies once too often. The Social Nature and Social Changes in the Light of Ethnic Conflicts, a research project carried out by Professor Zagorka Golubovic and Professor Mirjana Vasovic towards the end of 1993, showed that 61 percent of the Serbs thought the Croats had Ustashi leanings, and 5.6 percent thought this assertion was not true at all. Twenty-one per cent were undecided.

The questionnaire covered 1,555 respondents in Serbia and Vojvodina (without Kosovo), and 89 percent of those questioned were Serbs.

Asked whether Croats should be made to move out of Serbia, 12.8

percent of respondents said "Yes, all of them", 62 percent said "Those who are disloyal to the Serbian State", and 25 percent said "No". Asked whether they trusted the other ethnic groups, 69 percent of the respondents placed the Croats after the Albanians and Moslems as those who were not to be trusted, and the answers received to the question "What groups you would not like to live with" indicate that 25 percent of the respondents would not like to have Croat neighbors. Less desirable are only Albanians who traditionally rank the first on the list of Serb animosities. Bela Tonkovic, President of the Democratic Alliance of the Croats of Vojvodina (DSHV), the leading Croat ethnic party in Serbia, says that during the last four years there were eight cases of murdered and missing Croats, "several hundred" bomb attacks, several dozen arson cases, and that since 1991 about 40,000 Croats moved out of Serbia. Tonkovic complains that the state does nothing to protect them and expands the list of complaints with the removal of Croats from executive, judiciary, army and police positions. He says that there is not a single Croat school principal anymore.

As a coalition partner with by far the strongest Democratic Union of Vojvodina Hungarians (DZVM), Tonkovic's party is in power in Subotica, the municipality with the largest concentration of the Croat population in Serbia. However, the municipal authority has jurisdiction only over the public amenities which, one would say looking at the town, they efficiently solve. Another thing which the authority can solve, will happen shortly: after the prolonged and persistent indignation of the Serb editors and staff, the Croats will finally get their program on Subotica Radio. This might be the first step towards cultural self-government with some elements of social self-government (kindergartens, homes for the elderly...) which is one of the goals in the DSHV program. The party is committed to the ethnic self-rule presuming the transfer of some educational and information competencies from the state to the self-rule authorities; to the institution of an ombudsman and the right to have their representatives in the assemblies at all levels. All this would be controlled by international institutions.

The number of votes for the leading Croat ethnic party from the first to the latest elections dropped from close to 21,000 to less than 4,000, and its once untouchable leader Bela Tonkovic, now has more and more opponents.

One of the best known among them is Ivan Poljakovic, professor at

the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Subotica, whose objection to Tonkovic is that he sets out to identify the Croats with the party.

"We have the Croat language and should fight for it", says Bosko Kopilovic, owner of a prestigious Subotica trading company called Zrno-mag ('zrno' is Serb and Croat, and 'mag' Hungarian word for grain). Kopilovic is the chairman of the Subotica Committee of the Democratic Reform Party of Vojvodina (DRSV), Vice-President of the Party and Federal Assembly deputy. In his office hangs the portrait of Josip Broz Tito. "While he was alive, we were a reputable country and had the best prerequisites of all the socialist countries to normally advance towards the democratic society", explains Kopilovic. His party drafted the Bill on National Minorities. DRSV policy envisages, as one of the most important mechanisms to regulate the status of national minorities, local self-rule, multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-ethnic tolerant. "Why should in Horgos Serbs hold the offices of the Post Master, the school principal, the chief of police?" asks Kopilovic. In contravention of the tradition, the figures about the Croats' presence are deliberately at the end of this story from Subotica.

According the the statistics of the Catholic Church, in the municipality of Subotica 32 percent of the population are Croats, says Bela Tonkovic but, he adds, only 13 percent "dare say it". Others call themselves 'Yugoslavs' or 'Bunjevci'. Vojislav Sekelj, editor-in-chief of the private paper Zig published in Croatian, supplies other figures: of the Subotica municipality population of about 160,000, in the last census 16,000 individuals stated they were Croats and 17,000 said they were Bunjevci. The dispute turns on the following: Subotica Croats perceive Bunjevci as a cultural and ethnological specificity within the Croat ethnic body, and the latter perceive themselves as members of that cultural-ethnological specificity (Croat-Bunjevci) according priority to the ethnic specificity. On the other hand, those who call themselves Bunjevci perceive this option as the ethnic definition. On the eve of the census, Serbia's state media vigorously supported the Bunjevci ethnic specificity, but all the propagandastic hullabaloo notwithstanding, the results would not have been so impressive were it not for the authentic Bunjevci ethnic feeling. Thus the Croat and Bunjevci ethnic passions divided Tavankut, an almost "purely" Croat-Bunjevci village.

Ethnic intolerance is less felt in towns and is inversely proportional to the respondents' level of education. Even though the rural areas are the grey zone of the ethnic problem, incidents that took place in Belgrade received attention more often due to the media, relatively liberal attitudes and presence of non-governmental human rights organizations. The eviction of Anica Glusac (and Belgrade Mayor's help to find "emergency accommodation" for her) is a case still fresh in our minds. It happened when the ethnic fever was already subsiding. Ivo Viskovic, professor at the Political Sciences Faculty in Belgrade, says that retortion can be applied only to an enemy, but not towards one's own national. Viskovic is himself a Croat from Makarska, who lives and works in Belgrade. His neighbors do not refer to his child as "That Ustashi kid" anymore and threats over the telephone have stopped. Dr Viskovic, however, works in the tolerant academic environment which, he says, knew how to support him. He tends to attribute his troubles to his political involvement in the Civic Alliance. "There was one dignified way for a minority member to be integrated in the majority environment, and that was to call oneself a 'Yugoslav', but the environment was forcibly changed so that this has become unpopular now", says Dr Viskovic.

In the Belgrade office of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights,

Biljana Kovacevic indicates various federal decrees which, directly or indirectly, restrict the property rights of minority members. However, most problems derive from the fact that the Republic of Serbia and FR Yugoslavia have not adopted nationality acts yet. The Armed Forces Act of November 1993 thus sounds cynical when it says that the commissioned officers and civilians serving in the Armed Forces of Yugoslavia without the FR Yugoslav nationality need to acquire the relevant certificate "within six months". There is a tremendous number of outstanding cases so that even when the citizenship was easily provable, it often depended on the speed/slowness of the administration.

Lorand Kilbertus, parish priest in Belgrade, picturesquely describes the relations between the Croats and the majority people in Serbia: as a frozen lake - ice on the surface, and beneath it water flows, fish swim, life goes on. Zemun parish priest Kolarevic faces the dilemma whether to commend the relations in urban areas or draw attention to problems in the rural environment: Hrtkovci, Kukujevci, Morovic, Slankamen...

Croats ready to move to Croatia call on their Zemun priest. He refrains from assessing the number of those who left.

Serbs across the Drina often say that Belgrade is the "largest Ustashi city". Hearing this, Srecko Mihajlovic, a researcher in the Social Sciences Institute in Belgrade, asks: "And what would they say in Zagreb to that?"