Minorities Face Growing Intolerance

When a young criminal from the gypsy “mahala”, or neighbourhood, of Sivac killed a young Serb and wounded another earlier this year, local Serbs took the law into their own hands.

Gathering in the town hall of Kula, the nearest big town, they announced that the Roma of Sivac had until October 20 – the anniversary of the town’s liberation in the Second World War – to abandon their homes. “Scum!” some of them shouted. “We want Hitler!”

The threat was not idle. That night, vigilantes burst into the mahala. It is fortunate that they found no one there. All six families with 27 members had already fled.

Nor was that the end of the problems facing Roma living in and around Sivac, according to local Roma leaders.

Miodrag Pesic said Roma for weeks could not move around the village freely by day or night and that local people carried on inspecting the abandoned mahala nightly, to make sure that no one returned.

The vigilante patrols continued until September 5, when Roma representatives met Vojvodina’s Secretary for National Minorities, Tamas Korhec, who promised them police protection. That day, the Roma families came back to their mahala.

The ugly clashes in Sivac are not an isolated phenomenon in Vojvodina. Across the province, according to rights activists, minority groups face growing intolerance from a Serbian majority that has been embittered by poverty and the wars of the 1990s.

Most observers trace the start of the trouble to the hard-line nationalist rhetoric of the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, in the late 1980s.

Milan Djukic, of the NGO Network for Changes Yukom, says the climate of tolerance has deteriorated ever since, owing to a combination of poverty, a sharply altered ethnic structure and general rightwards drift in politics.

It is the ethnic profile of the province, perhaps, that has altered most visibly in the last few years.

The wars of the 1990s forced many young ethnic Hungarians and Croats to emigrate. Serb refugees from Bosnia and Hercegovina and Croatia took their places. Many of them took out their frustrations on other communities.

It is not only Roma who have since felt the chill wind of intolerance. There have been attacks on non-Serb churches and on homosexual groups.

Vladimir Ilic, of the Centre for the Development of Civil Society, based in Zrenjanin, in June noted a wave of attacks on Protestant churches in Novi Sad, Zrenjanin and Backa Palanka. The Adventist Church in Ruma, he said, had been attacked five times in six months.

Many other towns and villages are now daubed with chauvinist graffiti, while the town of Mali Idjos has witnessed several violent incidents between Serbs and Hungarians and between Serbs and Montenegrins, all three of which live side by side in the town.

Many analysts say there are strong ties between the nationalist Serbian Orthodox Church, SOC, and the perpetrators of aggressive incidents.

Milan Djukic, of Network for Changes, says offenders increasingly view anything outside the boundaries of the SOC as a target. Such people, he said, turn easily to stoning churches or desecrating minority community graves and cemeteries.

Pavel Domonji, of the Helsinki Human Rights Committee in Vojvodina, said the rise in tension and animosity towards minority groups, whether religious or national or sexual, dated back to the Milosevic regime – but the problem was that there had never been a sharp break with those policies.

”We still live in the shadow of the policies that led us into conflicts with the other peoples of the former Yugoslavia and with the international community,” he said.

Domonji said it was absurd to declare all the Roma in Sivac collectively guilty for a crime committed by one man, while at the same time denying any collective guilt for crimes committed by Serbs in the wars of the 1990s in Bosnia, Croatia or Kosovo.

“It’s clear that the frustrated majority needs a scapegoat to vent its anger on,” Domonji added.

It is not only ethnic minorities that have noted a growing climate of casual violence lately.

Carna Cosic, of Novi Sad’s Lesbian Organisation, said members of her group felt increasingly wary in public these days.

In June, she said, one member of the organisation was beaten up in the centre of Novi Sad “because she did not look feminine enough”.

She said the female owner of a gay club had been beaten up in Novi Sad by a group of young men who assaulted her when she was shutting. The club was closed soon after and now has to operate under a secret address.

Cosic said attempts to hold a festival in Novi Sad along the lines of the “gay pride” events that take place regularly in most European capitals today had also been abandoned under threats.

Even in Belgrade, the first ever attempt to hold a gay procession a few years ago backfired when the participants were attacked and beaten.

But the situation is worse in small communities in Vojvodina. According to Cosic, people who revealed their gay or lesbian orientation in the province should not be surprised to find their house covered in graffiti and the windows broken.

“We need a law on sexual minorities to decrease the tension, level of violence and fear,” she said.

Milan Djukic says Vojvodina is probably no different to the rest of the country when it came to discrimination; the main problem is that the state takes no preemptive action and deals only with perpetrators after the violent deed is done.

Djukic warns that the situation may get worse. The independence crisis over Kosovo and Montenegro will have implications for Vojvodina, he says, as it will fuel fears among Serbs that the province may also break away. In an atmosphere of paranoia about the country’s future, minorities are unlikely to have an easier ride of it than they do now.

Robert Vizi is an editor with Gradjanski List in Novi Sad.