Fear from Authorities and Seselj

The Helsinki Board for Human Rights in Serbia has conducted a poll of minorities in Serbia in June 1996. The sample of 100 Albanians, Hungarians, Moslems, Croats, Romanians, Slovaks and Russians was stratified by sex, age, education, residence and region.

The poll’s results show the members of minority groups mostly fear for their future existence. Over one half of those tested (50.1%) explicitly stated their fear, and over one-third of the polled expressed the feeling by stating that minorities’ rights will be harder realized in the future.

In spite of this feeling, however, it is interesting to note that only 21.9% of the polled plan to leave the country. The trend must be viewed in the context of current economic situation, especially in the light of the fact that this is the attitude of younger people with higher educational level.

It is somewhat of a paradox that Croats and Moslems fear the least for their future, although they are considered the most endangered. As the main causes of their problems they quoted the recent civil war, but also they observe it will be "gone with the wind" and the things will be as they used to be (the Croats frequently link it with the mutual recognition of the two states).

The second general observation is the extremely low knowledge of minorities’ rights. The greatest number of the polled voicing dissatisfaction by their status was not able to define the basis of their unequally and how it should be solved. The majority of the answers were about lost privileges, i.e., that which could be extracted from their own experience.

The most frequent complaint about inequality is experienced when applying for jobs, according to 39.7% of the tested. Although the unemployment problem may be connected to the overall economic situation, the examples of discrimination and the fact that the executive positions (and even plain administrative positions) are almost free of minority representatives additionally point to the severity of the situation.

The second place in the frequency of complaints concerns the schooling system (28.6%), especially mentioned by Hungarians, Slovaks and Romanians, as well as the right of using the native language in institutions (17.1%) and in information systems (15.2%).

Slovaks and Romanians are extremely dissatisfied by media and the way of passing information, while Hungarians are dissatisfied only by TV, and Rusians by the special TV show in their native language "Roskem slovom". Moslems and Croats do not have specialized TV shows in their native language, and they stress that their treatment by media is still burdened by animosity.

Culture problems are more frequently connected to financial poverty and problems within the minority peoples than to the lack of cultural freedom. The only exception are Croats who believe in non-existence of cultural freedom. The best rating is of the confession freedom. None of the polled had complaints of being deprived of that right. This is especially interesting in the context of the theses that the civil war was "the religious" war! Judging from our research, only 7.7% of the minorities’ representatives had bad experiences with the refugees. Among them, experiences with Croats are the worst, and the region of Srem is most frequently mentioned (Slovaks and Rusins also had bad experiences there).

The distrust in authorities can also be considered as one of the generators of fear within the minorities. "The replacement of the party in power" is the most frequently mentioned solution of the inequality problem (36.4%).

The political party which is most frequently mentioned as the propeller of imperilment is SRS, followed by SPS and Arkan’s SSJ (especially mentioned by the Moslems). Also, a number of the polled has been critically observing the minorities’ parties and considers them to be nationalistic.