THE TRACTOR OF NO RETURN

Vojvodina and the refugees

Having successfully channelled the wave of refugees away from the direction of cities and sent majority of the people from Krajina to the village households of Vojvodina, the state is busy dealing with its big problems, and these people are coping with the situation the best they can.

AIM, Novi Sad, October 23, 1995

When towards the end of summer, Knin Krajina fell and a tide of refugees rose towards Serbia (again) with the ultimate goal to avoid colonization of Kosovo and, if possible, to reach relatives in Vojvodina or Belgrade - inhabitants of Vojvodina were shocked by the number of people and the proportions of their suffering. The new-comers were also shocked - by the poverty of their hosts. For everything that was happening during those days, even Vojvodina which is used to colonizations, lacked experience.

When Vossa Independent, the humorous insert of the journal Nezavisni (Independent), awarded in the beginning of this autumn, an "Oscar" for the film "The Tractor of No Return" to Presidents of Croatia, Serbia and America, it was an unconcealed allusion to the fact that all post-war movements of the people end up in Vojvodina. Majority of orinary people was aware that most of the people who have come, will stay here for ever. Or at least as long as they do not finding anything better. Departure abroad is the only thing considered to be better.

Collective memories

In the beginning of September, it was publicized that more than 111 thousand refugees from Krajina have been accomodated in Vojvodina. Since it has more or less successfully channelled the wave of refugees away from the direction of the cities and sent majority of the people from Krajina into villages and village households, the state is busy with its own problems, and the people are coping with the situation the best they can. Both the hosts and those who have come and wish to stay because they have nowhere else to go. It is no anegdote that a single family in Stapar, a village close to Sombor, one of the rare purely Serb villages where there had been no colonists from the previous wars, had received 70 (!) relatives-refugees.

The situation is even more complicated in the so-called colonists' villages. Some municipalities have hosted an exceptionally large number of refugees: Sombor (12,774), Apatin (10,000), Stara Pazova (9,239), Ruma (8,773), Novi Sad (9,000)... Sometimes it happened that the population doubled in just a day or two, or that the refugees outnumbered their hosts. A part of the refugees is still waiting for winter in improvised collective accomodations. A public-opinion poll regularly conducted for the Vojvodina civic weekly Nezavisni by an agency called "Scientia" showed that 66 per cent of native inhabitants of Vojvodina believe that refugees should be accomodated "where they wish", but 18 per cent of them say: "Just not in Vojvodina". Despite this, a quarter of subjects of the poll welcomed refugees in their homes. The other 25 per cent did not assist in any way.

The basic issue was how to accomodate in a short time and as painlessly and as rationally as possible more than 100 thousand people, feed them and offer them any jobs so as to enable them to provide some income for themselves? The fact that, regardless of their former professions and knowledge, the refugees are now working as day labourers for village households can be interpreted as a quickly learnt lesson how to be practical. But, it can also be interpreted as "supplying" villages with cheap manpower: in some villages wages are 25 dinars (about 10 German marks), with no food. Dissapproval can be heard among the refugees, but at this moment - there is no choice. Their illusion, cherished for decades in former Yugoslavia, that Vojvodina is an extremely rich plain which can feed both itself and others.

In the meantime, Vojvodina was impoverished. The poll published in the journal Nezavisni shows that 58 per cent of the inhabitants of Vojvodina believe that their standard of living is lower than it was last year, a third thinks that it is equally (low?) as last year. The villages which bear the largest burden of accomodating and feeding refugees (and which had always been given the role of guardians of social peace in troublesome times), were blackmailed by the state with a low price of wheat and paying for it in three instalments. In other words, villages have been left penniless, because the first third of the money for wheat covered its production expenses, and the remainder was promised to be paid in promissory notes. As many as 62 per cent of the subjects believe that the refugees will affect the standard of living of their hosts.

Mutual dissatisfaction

It is characteristic that the refugees, as a rule, claim that they have left "over there" much more than they are getting "over here". It is obvious that some of them have been more prosperous in their previous life than their hosts. The result is double dissatisfaction: natives of Vojvodina fear new nationalization - especially in the light of the fact that the local authorities have made an inventory of "empty" houses, i.e. those not used by the local population, and moved refugees into them. Owners of such houses agreed to it, fearing that they would get new "tenants" even without their consent.

On the other hand, the refugees often say that gifts of furniture and clothing they get from their hosts are just "old junk" which again makes their hosts angry. And this is where the vicious circle closes.

The political picture is complex just like the space where several nations of several religions, churches and cultures have been living for several centuries, and which has received new inhabitants after (all) world wars, sometimes in completely new settlements. It would be interesting for experts, sociologists amnd psychologists to analyse why the refugees which have run away from the Croats "because they cannot live with them", choose religiously and ethnically completely mixed Vojvodina where there are not only Croats, but also Russians, Slovaks, Romanians and Hungarians.

Some of them have tried to transfer the "warriors' manner" of resolving the ethnic issues from their former environments. There were cases of threats and evictions. Just a small number agreed to live in Kosovo, and not too willingly. When attempts of evictions of the Croats (and there were incidents in almost all places with ethnically mixed population) had died down in a sense, the lucid and witty leader of the League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina, Nenad Canak, offered one of the possible solutions for easing ethnic tensions. "Had there been any sense", Canak believes, "it should have been admitted that if Vojvodina as an example of 'traditionally good interethnic relations' does exist, that there are also regions which are examples of 'traditionally bad interethnic relations'. And give a chance to the people from Vojvodina to help those others to improve interethnic relations, instead of letting those others 'administer' Vojvodina and spoil what had been achieved in Vojvodina with great efforts after centuries of efforts".

It seems there is no end to provocations of the local population, but they just change their form. During the first few days, representatives of the Radicals (whose leader is the Serb extremist Vojislav Seselj) took the refugees around Vojvodina villages and demanded from the Croats to give up their houses to the Serb refugees (like, for instance, in the village of Stanisic, or similarly in Srem, where there were cases of physical maltreatment of the local Croats). After an intervention of the militia and special units of the Ministry of the Interior of Serbia, exchange of property became fashionable. Nowadays, some refugees come on their own and offer "three-storey houses in Zadar" for an estate in Vojvodina. Such "deals" were, first by the decision of the Croat Government (on free use of the Serb property in Krajina), and then by its legalization, reduced to complete uncertainty.

The Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians (SVM) warns that its office in Subotica, a city in the far North of Vojvodina, "registers instances of maltreatment of citizens by the refugees and those who 'take care of them' at the expense of the citizens". SVM mentions that "in some parts of Subotica, hand-written threatening leaflets have recently appeared in mail-boxes of citizens, causing fear among the inhabitants of Hungarian nationality". Such "love letters" ("Get lost, you Hungarian swine, and let us have what is ours"), spreads fear among all the natives.

Noone knows how many inhabitants of Vojvodina have left in the past two months. In the first few days, the chaos forced a certain number of the Croats to leave for Croatia. From Stanisic alone, which is a typical colonized village (after the Second World War both the Serbs and the Croats were colonized here) half way between Subotica and Sombor, according to unofficial data, more or less without pomp, 57 families have gone. About seventy families stayed, but they are victims of occasional threats by telephone. In August, in the first wave, about 1200 refugees arrived in this village of 4,000 inhabitants. There were threats, night shooting and mass village meetings, and members of special police units were also seen in the village.

Villages in Srem have also been under great pressure. According to testimonies of a woman from Ruma, where militia prevented physical maltreatment and evictions of the Croats from their houses, some refugees from Knin said that they had been specifically told back in Krajina that they would be going to Ruma, a part called Breg, where there were Croat houses for them. It was noted that in Petrovaradin, a part of Novi Sad, refugees from Krajina demanded a list of Croats from the local communities. The officials refused to give them, and the Mayor of Novi Sad promised that "citizens of Croat nationality can be peaceful in Novi Sad". It seemed that the Serb legal state functioned. Nevertheless, the Croats still wonder - was anyone ever arrested for having threatened people?

On the other hand, some of the refugees (still) cannot accept the reconcilable attitude of the inhabitants of Vojvodina who tend to say: "Why should it bother me to have four Hungarians in the village, I'd better bring another one, so I can have more friends, and then we can do business together". And this very attitude is actually the Vojvodina pattern of living with the others.

Milena Putnik