Átlátszó Vajdaság seeks to address issues regarding the public life of Hungarians in Vojvodina. At the same time we are in a unique situation: we live at the borders of the Western Balkans and we also speak the Southern Slavic languages. Events concerning the public life of ethnic Hungarians sometimes come to our line of sight via the local media, because the Hungarian-language media outlets report about them only with delay or never. Our portal therefore occasionally also deals with events in the Western Balkans.
However, to ensure that our readers can always relate back to a key event, concept or character, we start with a series of articles that will provide some background – or at least contextualise the needed information. The article below summarises what one should know about Vojvodina and what historical and public events contributed to the current situation of Hungarians in Vojvodina.
The History of the Region
Vojvodina is the northern region of Serbia, divided into three territorial units by three rivers: the Danube, the Tisza and the Sava. The territorial units: Bačka, Banat and Srem cover a total area of 21 506 km². Its national park, Mt. Fruška Gora is a famous wine-growing region.
According to 2022 census data, 26,15% of the country’s population, i.e. 1 749 356 inhabitants, including Serbs, Hungarians, Romanians, Bunjevacs, Slovaks, Croats, Russians and about 20 other nationalities, live in the province.
Vojvodina has always been an ethnically and religiously heterogeneous region, and the ethnic map of its population has always changed in the light of historical events. Mostly Hungarian geographical and personal names in the records from the 14th century suggest that the predominant part of the population was Hungarian. The first major changes in the region’s ethnic map were caused by the settlement of the southern Slavs fleeing northwards from the Ottoman advance, and, after the Battle of Mohács, of the Hungarians fleeing northwards from the 150-years long Ottoman occupation.
The resettlement of the depopulated area took place between 1720 and 1787 according to the plans of the emperors Charles VI, Maria Theresa and Joseph II. At the beginning of the 19th century, the population of Bačka by ethnicity was as follows: 44% Serbs, 31,5% Hungarians and 24,5% Germans, while in Banat it was: 29% Serbs, 25% Germans, 18% Hungarians, with Romanians and other nationalities making up the rest. This ratio among the ethnicities remained largely unchanged until the end of World War II.
Rising revolutionary sentiment and nationalism in the mid-19th century, reached the Slavs living in the region as well. In the spirit of their linguistic, cultural and political independence, the Serbs proclaimed Serbian Vojvodina in May 1848. Achieving independence was accompanied by bloody fightings. In 1849, a province called the Voivodeship of Serbia and Temes Banat was formed, and it existed until 1860, when the territory was returned to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy by an imperial decree. The following decades were relatively peaceful, marked by industrialisation and construction until World War I. The still dominant image of Vojvodina was formed during this period.
Changes of Sovereignity in the 20th Century
After loosing World War I, in November 1918, at the National Assembly in Novi Sad, the Serbs declared the secession of Bačka, Banat and Baranja and their accession to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which was finalized by the Treaty of Trianon on 4 June 1920. The territory became part of the new South Slavic state after the ratification of the peace treaty in 1921.
An area of about 21 000 square kilometres and, according to the 1921 census, 467 658 Hungarians living there came under the jurisdiction of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes with the change of sovereignity.
In the first years of World War II, Bačka and Baranja were returned to Hungary, and that was the second change of sovereignity. However, the return was overshadowed by the events of January 1942, known as the “cold days”, during which thousands of Hungarian Jews and Serbs lost their lives.
The third change of sovereignity took place in the autumn of 1944, and under the terms of the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty, Bačka was placed under the jurisdiction of the second Yugoslav state for good. The Yugoslav communist partisans executed tens of thousands of Hungarians throughout Vojvodina in the period between the winter of 1944/45 and January 1948. It is estimated that the number of innocent Hungarian victims was between 10 and 40 thousand, but the Hungarian-Serbian Joint Academic Committee, established to scientifically prove the historical facts, has not finalised its research findings to this day.
After World War II, in the first years of consolidation, the new Yugoslav state applied full rigour. Goli otok (“Barren Island”), the site of a political prison, played a major role in that, where political prisoners, known or alleged to pose security threat, were treated with extreme cruelty. From the second half of the 1950s onwards, state politics was characterised by a so-called “soft dictatorship”, i.e. the people of Yugoslavia, including ethnic Hungarians in Vojvodina, enjoyed a relatively high degree of freedom, though with certain limitations, which included the ban of any criticism of the party and the supreme leader, Josip Broz Tito. However, after Tito’s death in 1980, the semblance of unity could not be maintained for long.
The necessiated regime change in Yugoslavia in the late 1980s took more than ten years and could only be achieved after years of war and bloodshed.
Slobodan Milošević’s power was continually growing in the second half of the 1980s and he used it to provide the Serbs with a pivotal role in the internal affairs among the member republics. On 6 October 1988, in an event known as the “Yoghurt Revolution”, pro-Milošević protesters forced the leaders of the League of Communists of Vojvodina to resign. The new Serbian constitution, introduced in 1990, abolished the autonomy of the provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo, thereby centralised Serbia’s government politics. Milošević’s supporters in Montenegro also forced the leadership to resign. However, Slovenia banned mass demonstrations that could have led to resignations there. In January 1990, at the 14th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the Slovenian and Croatian delegations, later the Macedonian and Bosnian delegations, left the meeting over fundamental and serious disagreements, and that led to the collapse of the state union system and the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
The Breakup of Yugoslavia
Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence on 25 June 1991. However, the Serb minority in Croatia resisted and declared the independence of the Krajina region which led to unrest in the country. In support of the Serb rebels the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) intervened in the conflict. Due to the bleak situation, Croatia suspended its declaration of independence for three months. The Slovenian authorities took over the control of the border crossings from the Yugoslav authorities, which the Yugoslav army leadership qualified as a unilateral alteration of boundaries and launched an attack on Slovenia. The war, also known as the “10-day war”, broke out on 26 June 1991 and ended on 7 July. When the news came in of the first Hungarian military victims of the Croatian war, pro peace rallies were organised across Vojvodina.
Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina proclaimed the Bosnian Serb Republic/Republika Srpska in January 1992, as part of the federal Yugoslavia. Slovenia and Croatia was recognized as an independent country first by the European Community and later the USA, while the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina was recognised later. However, the Montenegrins and the Bosnian Serbs rejected independence from Serbia in a referendum. The so-called “Žabljak Constitution” was promulgated on 27 April, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was created under that constitution from the ruins of Montenegro and Serbia.
The resettlement of Serbian refugees in the Hungarian-inhabited areas of Vojvodina began in 1992, which was seen by the Hungarian politicians of the period as a planned alteration of ethnic proportions.
More than 350 thousand Serbs arrived in Vojvodina, while tens of thousands of Hungarian students and military service age men – sometimes entire families – left their homeland between 1991 and 1995.
Presidents Franjo Tuđman of Croatia, Slobodan Milošević of Yugoslavia and Alija Izetbegović of Bosnia and Herzegovina signed the Dayton Agreement on 21 November 1995, which ended the war in Bosnia. The peace treaty, under which Bosnia and Herzegovina was divided into two entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska, was signed in Paris on 14 December.
The Years of NATO Bombing
A couple of years later, the conflict in Kosovo escalated.
In order to bring Yugoslavia to its knees, the international community launched a seventy-eight days long NATO bombing campaign, during which several settlements in Vojvodina were bombed, too.
In March 1998, armed clashes broke out in Kosovo after Milošević sent armed troops to protect local Serbs. The units included seven hundred Hungarian soldiers from Vojvodina. At the news of the first Hungarian casualties, József Kasza, mayor of Subotica and president of the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians (VMSZ), urged the men conscripted to refuse the order for military service. Ethnic-based clashes have become a regular occurrence in Vojvodina, with mainly Serbs beating up Hungarians.
On 10 October 1998, NATO sent a formal note to the Hungarian government requesting the unrestricted use of Hungarian airspace for its operations in Yugoslavia. Although the Hungarian government drew attention to the special interests of the Hungarians in Vojvodina, it approved the request.
Referring to Serbia’s aggression in Kosovo, the NATO launched its bombing campaign on 24 March 1999, during which Hungarian-populated areas were attacked multiple times. Public gatherings were banned in the country, and it was followed by prohibiting the renewal of passports and foreign travels for military service aged men.
In order to prevent the deployment of forces from Vojvodina to Kosovo, NATO planes bombed all three bridges over River Danube in Novi Sad during April. On 15 April, four shells hit the north-eastern part of Subotica in an air raid. Three shells were dropped on military targets and one hit a residential area, causing the collapse of ten houses. On 19 April, a second air strike hit Subotica, but this time no civilian facilities were hit. In May, the Novi Sad TV building was hit.
From the Democratic Turnover Until Present Day
The Serbian leadership had to accept the UN resolution declaring the end of the war, and on 10 June 1999 the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia ended. However, it was only in the autumn of 2000 that the rule of Slobodan Milošević was overthrown by the Serbian citizens united around the Otpor (Resistance) Movement and the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (SDD) who rallied against electoral fraud.
Massive demonstrations were held across the country on October 5, 2000, and the military and police eventually sided with the protesters. The Democratic Opposition of Serbia took power in Belgrade. Milošević conceded defeat the next day. Extraordinary parliamentary elections were held in December, in which the Democratic Opposition won with a two-thirds majority, making Zoran Đinđić – who had also been the leader of the Democratic Party (DP) since 1994 –, Serbia’s first democratically elected prime minister. In 2001, the new government included József Kasza, who served as the Head of the Government until 2003.
Zoran Đinđić was assassinated in front of the government building in Belgrade in 2003.
In February 2003, the FRY became the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro. Đinđić had been assassinated in March, and the Democratic Opposition was dissolved within a couple of months later, hence extraordinary elections were called for in Serbia. A coalition of the Democratic Party of Serbia, G17 Plus and the Serbian Renewal Movement – New Serbia won the elections and formed a government. However, in 2004 an opposition politician, Boris Tadić from the Democratic Party, became president.
After a referendum in 2006, Montenegro declared its independence and the Republic of Serbia was formed. After the 2007 parliamentary elections, the Democratic Party – in coalition with the Democratic Party of Sandžak – became the leading party in the government. Kosovo, the other autonomous province alongside the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in Serbia, also declared its independence in 2008, but this has not been recognised by Serbia to date. In any case, the situation in Kosovo warranted early elections, in which the Democratic Party re-strengthened its position in 2008, yet, the end of its parliamentary term was marred by infighting and corruption scandals.
It was the first election where the Serbian Progressive Party (SPP) participated. The party was founded in 2008 by Tomislav Nikolić, after he had left the Serbian Radical Party. The SPP won the 2012 parliamentary elections and in coalition with the Serbian Socialist Party (SSP) formed a government.
In the meantime, the party leader was replaced by the former Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić. In 2014, the Serbian Progressive Party (SPP) and the Serbian Socialist Party (SSP) dissolved the government and called extraordinary parliamentary elections, which resulted in Vučić becoming prime minister, and he consolidated this position in the early parliamentary elections in 2016. Vučić ran for the president of the Republic in 2017, and he won and has been holding this post ever since. Ana Brnabić became the Prime Minister of Serbia in 2017 who – although she became the country’s first female Prime Minister as an independent –, has also joined the SPP in the meantime. The Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians has also been the coalition partner of the SPP since 2014 until today, therefore, it is considered a governing party in Serbia.
After the democratic transition, the issue of Vojvodina’s autonomy, abolished in 1990, was back on the agenda. In 2002, the Parliament in Belgrade, within the consolidation process and under international pressure, adopted the so-called Omnibus Law (Law on the Definition of Certain Autonomous Provincial Powers of 2002), which restored several autonomous powers to Vojvodina, including the return of state administration powers to the province.
Following the adoption of the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia in 2006, the Assembly of Vojvodina started to draft the legislative framework for the province. The draft Statute of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina was finalised by 2008 and entered in force in 2010. The Provincial Statute, adopted in 2014, is currently in force.
The law defining the competences of the autonomous province was adopted by the Serbian Parliament in 2009, but these competences have been continuously curtailed by the authorities of the Republic over the last decade, consequently, there was a need to harmonise former provincial laws with Republic’s decrees, and to downsize or subordinate some institutions to the centralised administration in Belgrade, and, last but not least, the province’s funding was insufficient. According to the Constitution of the Republic, the VAT budget should account for at least 7% of the budget of the Republic of Serbia.
The Hungarians in Vojvodina
As can be seen from the above summary, the last one hundred and five years of Vojvodina’s history have been a rather burdensome period for the ethnicities living in the region, including the Hungarian national community counting almost half a million, who, after the Treaty of Trianon, found themselves stranded on the opposite side of Hungary’s southern border.
Between 1918 and 1923, the first southern Slav state forced some 40 000 Hungarians to leave their homeland. During the interwar period, roughly the same number of Hungarians, deprived of their livelihoods, who lived mainly from agriculture, were forced to emigrate and found a new home, mostly in the Americas.
The years of World War II from 1941 till 1944 claimed massive human sacrifices first from the Serbs and Jews of Vojvodina, later from the Hungarians and Germans in the period from 1944 to ‘48. During this period, the Hungarian community was plaqued not only by physical annihilation, but also by a new wave of migration when about 40–60 thousand people left their homeland.
It should also be pointed out, that the extermination of the Jews of Bačka and the mass emigration of Holocaust survivors facilitated by the second Yugoslav state, in addition to the erosion of the ethnic Hungarian community forced to minority, had a serious impact on the ethnic Hungarians’ loss of economic and intellectual space in Vojvodina. The tragedy of our times is that historical facts have not been mutually recognised, hence the events of the genocides committed between 1941 and 1948 cannot be finally brought to a close by mutual concoradance; nevertheless, this topic will be dealt with in details later.
National and regional identity was completely obfuscated by the Yugoslav socialist idea in the following decades,
which intensified assimilation in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s by creating the atmosphere of well-being and prosperity, based on confiscated assets of many deceased or dispossessed capitalists and massive state loans (holidays on the Adriatic Sea, red passports, jeans, the spirit of freedom in the spirit of cosmopolitanism and tacit approval of the infiltration of cultural movements from the Western world).
Then there were the South Slavic wars of the 1990s, first the 1991–1995 wars, then the 1999 Kosovo conflict and the NATO bombing that stopped it. In demographic terms, the last decade of the twentieth century saw a further demographic decline at the expense of the Hungarian community. On the one hand, the emigration of Hungarians fleeing the war and the existential insecurity that followed, and the resettlement of Serbs from the former successor states of the Yugoslav Federation on the other, changed the ethnic proportions of the region in Vojvodina.
After the democratic transition, the first decade of the 2000s saw some consolidation and a drop in emigration. However, the SPP – by today the ruling party for almost 10 years – after 2012 among its first measures introduced the recruitment freeze in public sector in an attempt to dismantle the DP’s party-based employment system. The Serbian government’s decree was valid until 2021 and made it impossible for fresh graduates with higher education, including many Hungarians from Vojvodina, to find jobs.
This did not happen during the years of war. But in the 2010s, as a sign of national unity, the opportunity offered by the Fidesz government
gave thousands of Hungarian families in Vojvodina the initial push to leave their homeland for good, now with an EU passport in hand.
We still have to wait a couple of months for the latest figures on the population of Hungarians in Vojvodina to be published. The results – relating to the population data – of the 2022 autumn census have already been partially published by the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia, but the population figures of ethnic communities will not be published until April 2023. According to initial estimates, between 2011 and 2022, the number of Hungarians in Vojvodina have decreased by about 20%, from 253 899 at that time to less than 200 000.
Text: Virág Gyurkovics
Cover illustration: Satellite image of Vojvodina. Source: Google Earth
The text was originally published in Hungarian on 14. 02. 2023.