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Date:         Wed, 9 Sep 1992 23:05:00 EST
From:         CATHYF@EARLHAM.BITNET
Subject:      MIRacles No. 9 from Balkans

/* Written  3:27 pm  Aug 19, 1992 by gn:jsax in cdp:gen.quaker *//*
---------- "MIRacles No. 9" ---------- */
Subject: MIRacles No. 9


==================================================================
MIRacles  No.  9
    Joel GAzis-SAx
Zagreb, 19 Kolovoz 1992
 Copyright 1992
==================================================================
"Our homeland is where we live," Ivan Polakovic of the United Croatian
Democratic Party of Vojvodina (DSHV) and member of the Vojvodinan Parliament
tells me.  "We are not looking to become part of Croatia.  What we want is
cultural autonomy."  He has bad news for me.  The day before I arrive in
Subotica , Vojvodina, (August 3) two Croats, Nada and Stipan Gustine, are
killed in the village of Bac.  No one knows who killed them.  On their chests
had been carved the legend "HDZ:  We will drink your blood."

According to Ivan, 17,000 Croats have been expelled or forced to flee
fromSrem, the southernmost third of Vojvodina.  They leave because of violence
or threats against them or because of the Serbian Republic government attempts
to mobilize them into the army.  Ivan believes that mobilization constitutes a
means of "ethnically cleansing" Vojvodina of its Croats and other minorities.
The Croats, he insists, were drafted by force and sent to the Slavonian,
Bosnian, or Dalmatian front.  There many of them died when they were put in
forward units.  Their wounds, Ivan says, were in both the back and the front.
"Officially we have peace.  We are not at war.  The coffins, however, come
from Bosnia and from Dubrovnik."

"If you live here," he says, "this is your duty.  What can you do?  Either you
go into the army or you flee.  In either case, the house is empty."  Ivan is,
himself, a mobilization resister.  He spent several months of his life hiding
and working, hiding and working so that the mobilization officers could not
find him.  You can see that he has lost weight.  The darkness under his eyes
betrays the many fitful nights he has spent worrying about his freedom. When I
take my leave of him, he gives me several copies of the party newsletter.  I
shake his hand and ask him if there is anything he wants. "The same rights
guaranteed to the other Yugoslav citizens," he replies."It is difficult for
Serbs to understand minority problems," said Ferenc Csubela, Hungarian MP from
Mornica.  "They have no language problems, no problems with their schools."  I
found even peace activists insisting that part of the problem in the new
Yugoslavia was caused by the unwillingness of certain minorities to join in
the national culture.  Serbs and Yugoslavs (people of mixed ethnicity who
choose this designation for themselves) tend to characterize Croats,
Hungarians, and others as people who do not wish to be part of their society.
These others speak of the unwillingness of the Serbs and the Yugoslavs to
allow them to be different within that same society.

The Hungarians of Vojvodina insist that what they want is to enjoy their
personal and ethnic rights within Yugoslavia.  They do not look to Hungary to
liberate them by invading and annexing Vojvodina.  They want their language,
they want their culture, and they want their schools in Yugoslavia.  They want
to remain where they are.

There are many threats to their continued life in Vojvodina.  According to
Ference, the Serbian Republic government has been telling Serbian refugees
from Bosnia, Dalmatia, and Slavonia that they can come to Vojvodina where they
can live in the homes of the Hungarians.  One Hungarian woman reported to me:
"A few weeks ago, some little Serbian refugee children came to our house and
asked my mother when we Hungarians would go."

Hungarians flee economic pressure as well as political pressure.  Csubela
reported the story of one man whose salary fell to 75 dm or about $50 a month.
 His rent remained stable at 100 dm or about $70!  The lure of better jobs
depopulates Vojvodina, not only of its Hungarians, but also its Serbs, Croats,
and other ethnic groups.  The wealthier life that beckons from abroad strips
the land of much of the Hungarian workforce.


Many Hungarian homes are empty because of mobilization.  Though Hungarians
comprise less than 2 percent of the total population of Serbia, the mayor of
Ada told us, they form about 10 percent of the army.  As Hungarians die in the
field, many young men choose to resist.  Ada was the first town in Yugoslavia
where the young men banded together and openlydeclared their resistance to
mobilization.  Though the 100 refusers could have served 60 day prison terms
before being called up again, nothing happened.

When residents of nearby Oromhegyes decided to resist by declaring a
surrealistic "Spiritual Republic of Zitzer" last May, the Serbian government
responded by surrounding the town with 92 tanks for three days.  Other
villages (including at least one Serbian town controlled by the Serbian
Democratic Party) have also organized support for their young men who chose
not to fight in the Serbian war.  Of the estimated100,000 young men who left
Yugoslavia to escape mobilization, 25,000 were Hungarian.

The Hungarians have been emphatic about facing mobilization and other ethnic
pressures nonviolently.  "The problem cannot be solved by arms," one Ada town
official told me.  "This would mean the massacre of the Hungarian people."


Serbian and Yugoslav officials regard every action of Hungarian ethnic
organizations and political parties with suspicion.  When the HungarianParty
of Vojvodina held its annual meeting this year, the official media reported
that its purpose was to declare Vojvodinan independence.  A delegation of
Hungarians was dispatched to Beograd to set the story straight with Slobodan
Milosevic.  The Serbian President, Ada's mayor reports, was surprised by this
revelation.

"We must fight for our rights with both the Serbian Socialist Party and with
the opposition, too," the mayor told me.  I now believe that as a peace
activist, my duty is not to struggle against nationalism, but against those
nationalisms which oppress other nationalism.  The struggles of the Croat and
the Hungarian minorities in Yugoslavia and of the Serbs in Croatia demonstrate
the failure of Yugoslav nationalism and of the nationalisms which succeeded
it.

"The solution is not for all Croats to become Serbs," says Tibor Varody, the
Yugoslav Federal Minister of Justice, "or Serbs to become Croats, just like
the solution in the Middle East is not for all Jews to become Arabs or Arabs
to become Jews."  Varody, a Hungarian Yugoslav, is emphatic that nothing in
his remarks implies that there is no state called Croatia or that there is no
Bosnia or that there is no Slovenia.  He is realistic about the present state
of affairs in former Yugoslavia and he knows, like everyone here knows, that
something terrible has happened.

"I do not believe that national affiliation is bad in itself," he continues.
"It is fine for a Serb to be proud to be a Serb, for a Croat to be proud to be
a Croat, for a Hungarian to be proud to be a Hungarian.  The problem starts
when you are losing tolerance.  When a Serb starts to believe that a Hungarian
is not a human being, here the problem starts."

Because I arrived so ignorant, I am at first surprised by Varody's sincerity
and compassion.  As an outsider, I had to struggle to get beyond the
misunderstanding that the new Yugoslavia was identical to Serbia and that
Slobodan Milosevic was its its leader.  I had difficulty understanding where
this Yugoslav-American businessman, Federal Prime Minister Milan Panic, fit
into the picture.  When I come back to Croatia, others who have not visited
Yugoslavia, are quick to dismiss Panic as a Milosevic puppet.  But after
meeting Varody, I am not so sure.  The government of the New Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia may, at this time, not have much power over the constitutionally
subsidiary government of Milosevic's Republic of Serbia, but Panic, I now
believe, is struggling to lead the country away from militarism and ethnic
persecution.

"Minorities not only have the right to be equal:  they have the right to be
different,"  Varody observes that this is not a matter of economics, but of
culture.  "Minorities," he goes on to say, "are also taxpayers."  So they have
the right to have separate schools and cultural institutions if they so
please.The answer, he feels, is autonomy and decentralization.  International
monitoring and guidance are additional components, he believes, in the
ultimate formula of peace and national tolerance.

Varody has drafted an Act on Amnesty for all those who refused to take part in
"this senseless war".  The act, if passed by the Yugoslav Parliament, will
apply to all those who did not otherwise take up arms against the Yugoslav
republic.

I decide to press him about the case of seven Croat soldiers convicted of war
crimes and armed insurrection by a military court in Beograd.  When I ask him
about under what juristiction the court can try these men, he explains that
the crimes for which the men were tried occurred in October, two months before
Croatia received international recognition.  It is a legalistic splitting of
hairs, but I feel moved to continue.  I express my disagreement with him, but
ask if he would accept the jurisdiction of a neutral international court in
such cases.  Varody pauses to think for a moment and says "Yes.  I think that
could help bring peace."

I and the other members of the Peace Camp talk excitedly about our meeting
with Varody for several days.  This sincere man represents some of the best
hopes for peace and ethnic harmony -- if his agenda can succeed over that of
the Serbian Socialist Party.  When I ask him about whether the Serbs will
allow him to do his work, he tells me about the men and women, leaders of Srem
villages, who came to him during his first two weeks of office, to ask him to
intercede on behalf of Croat victims of atrocities.  "All the leaders were
Serbs."

We are led to hope for the passage of Varody's Amnesty while we are inthe new
Yugoslavia, but a few days later we learn that parliamentary machinations and
objections by the Serbian Socialist Party effectively postpone action on the
bill until September.  We visit many more villages of resisters and we visit
Vukovar.  While we are in Vukovar, four Serbs die in a nearby village when
they pass too close to the Croatian lines.  The ultimate human rights
violator, the war, takes these four from their homeland.  Whether Croat or
Serb or Bosnian or Hungarian, we are all equal in death.

ABOUT THE TITLE:  Brethren theogian Dale Brown once counted the ability to
believe in miracles as an essential component in the psychic constituency of
the peace activists.  "Mir" is the word for "peace" in Croatian, Serbian, and
most other Slavic languages.  The title, therefore, reflects the writer's
personal belief in persistant peacemaking.

* * *
This publication is circulated over the Association for Progressive
Communications Networks, Quaker-L, FidoNet, EcuNet, and UseNet by Joel
GAzis-Sax.  Users may download this article for their own use, but areasked to
make a donation to help support Joel's work in the Balkans.Checks should be
made in U.S. dollars and made out to Palo Alto Friends Meeting and earmarked
"Balkans Peace Fund".  The address is:

                 Palo Alto Friends Meeting
                 957 Colorado Avenue
                 Palo Alto, California     94303
                 U.S.A.
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