From: Lynn Gazis-Sax <lgsax@igc.apc.org>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia
Date: 19 Aug 92 18:17 PDT
Subject: MIRacles No. 9
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1475300366:000:11841
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!lgsax    Aug 19 18:17:00 1992


From: Lynn Gazis-Sax <lgsax>
Subject: MIRacles No. 9

/* 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 from 
Srem, 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 openly 
declared 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 Hungarian 
Party 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 in 
the 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 are 
asked 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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