Rejection of the war by Serbia's non-Serb communities —in particular the Hungarians of
Vojvodina and the Albanians of Kosovo, increasingly deprived of national rights, may play
The following article, taken from the liberal
Belgrade paper, Vreme, of November 11, 1991, describes an anti-war rebellion in one region of
International Viewpoint #218 • December 9, 1991
YUGOSLAVIA the crucial role in this. Vojvodina. DOCUMENT
AST TUESDAY, November S, the planned mobilization of a Territorial Defence Unit in Senta provoked a spontaneous mass rebellion, not only of the reservists and their families but also of other citizens of this little Backa town. This should come as no surprise, since Backa — and Vojvodina as a whole - has borne a far greater burden of this war than is fair. The citizens of Vojvodina in any case complain that the province is now ruled by settlers from Montenegro and Herzeg ovina who are making their own careers by offering up the Vojvodina people as cannon fodder to their leader Milosevic. Additional tension is caused by refugees from Slavonia [in Croatia] and their alleged privileges. Finally, the treatment of Vojvodina within "united" Serbia has provoked increasing unhappiness, espe cially as a result of the proposed territorial re-organization [aimed at breaking up the unity of the province].
Given the anxiety caused by this unwanted war and the frustration with the new leaders, the rebellion in Santa came as no surprise. The people demanded an emergency session of the Senta municipal assembly. When convened, it adopted by majority vote the decision to conduct a referendum, as allowed by its statute and other legal acts. In this referendum, answers will be sought to three questions:
1. Do you support the war?
2. Do you agree that your co-citizens should take part in it?
3. Do you agree that citizens who against their will find themselves on the front or in the training centres should immediately return home?
unitro Unsuccessful mobilization of
Preserve troops
The following day the Novi Sad [the capital of Vojvodina] daily Dnevnik, in an article headlined "Canak makes trouble" wrote: "It is not difficult to guess the result of the referendum on which Canak insists, given the unsuccessful mobilization of the Territorial Defence Unit and given the fact that 80% of Senta's citizens are Hungarian." The referendum thus becomes a plot by Nenad Canak, president of the Social Democratic League of Vojvodina, rather than a decision by Senta's assembly and citizens. Because of his attempt to articulate politically this anti-war mood, Nanad Canak became Public Enemy Number One in the eyes of the state.
The virus of anti-war rebellion, however, soon spread from Senta to Ada, where over one thousand citizens gathered on the evening of November 7 to listen tosseveral Hungarian and Serb anti-war activists. "We do not wish death to replace life" said Ferenc Pap from Novi Sad. In the meantime the authorities organized as well. When a delegation from Senta tried to go to Temerin they were met by a large group of heavily armed policemen.
With their guns at the ready, the police forced the buses back without any explanation, some of them shouting "Don't stop until the Hungarian border!" Dnevnik now began to describe the peace meetings as "non-Serb" and to exploit the support given to them by the Democratic Union of Vojvodina Hungarians and the Democratic Union of
І ЗЯСИА Croats of Vojvodina.
The campaign against the peace activists followed the well-known pattern. Nanad Canak was chosen as the main culprit. In a statement issued on November 7 by the regional branch of [Milosevic's] Socialist Party of Serbia, Canak was described as "the extended arm of the Croatian fascist hordes." The statement implicitly called for his arrest and lynching when it said: "By their actions, Canak and his co-thinkers are openly siding with the pro-fascist Ustasha politics of the Croatian leadership."
Arrest of leading antiwar activist
After the state organs had several times been called upon to act, they finally obliged on the night of November 7 (the anniversary of the October Revolution), when, shortly after midnight, Nenad Canak was arrested in Novi Sad and taken to a police station for questioning There he was handed over to the military police who informed him that he had been called-up. They took him first to the Marshal Tito and then to the Majevica barracks.
[According to a statement subsequently issued by the Social Democratic League of Vojvodina, Canak was arrested at the request of the military authorities, although he had never received any callup papers.]
The regime press has done all it could to publicly malign Nenad Canak and the peace activists from Senta, Ada, Temerin, Becaj, Novi Sad and other Vojvodina towns, playing at the same time the card of racial hatred. The peace movement in
As elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the turning point of the 1990s has been marked by the end of the State-Party system and the onset of privatization. But, as in the USSR, the crisis has incited the richer republics to leave the sinking ship, hoping thus to enter more rapidly into "Europe". However, the crisis has mainly taken the form of the
Serb/Croat conflict and an undeclared war
"in defence of Serb minorities" (as the Serb regime and the army put it, or as their opponents put it, an attack on Croat sovereignty and territory, according to an
How have the unions dealt with this
Situation? And first of all how have they been affected by the changes in the regimes?
Vojvodina was described as "the fifth column in Serbia, intentionally and unintentionally opening the door to the humiliation and destruction of the Serb nation"; "a dirty and dishonorable fraud following the well-tried Albanian recipe"; "the vampire-like emanation of the spirit of autonomism"; "a knife in the back of Serbia and its leadership."
The repression also followed the wellestablished pattern also. Prior to Nenad Canak's arrest, the military police went to the Crisis Centre of the Peace Movement in Senta and arrested two of its activists. The day before it had arrested Janos Szabo, president of the Crisis Centre, at the moment when he was receiving medical treatment following a heart attack. On November 8, the Senta Crisis Centre issued a dramatic statement: "The forces of WAR have started a decisive battle against our forces of PEACE.. The dismayed and emotionally exhausted people of Senta continue to press their demand for peace, while forced recruitment of Senta's young men in a crazy and mindless war continues." Veterans and Peace-Loving
Citizens
In the Backa, things are taking their own course. After returning from the front, veterans from Horgos established an Organization of War Veterans and Peace-Loving Citizens, which soon gathered several hundred members and has continued to grow.
Their founders speak of their bitterness about the "fratricidal war in which they
YUGOSLAVIA no longer wish to participate" of the "great deceptions of the military authorities" and of the fact that every fifth victim among the Vojvodina reservists is a Hungarian.
The Hungarian minority is increasingly clear that it does not wish to take part in a war between Serbs and Croats. The Subotica regional committee of the Hungarian Democratic Union has stated that "Hungarians should not have to take part in a war between Slav nations" and that an ever increasing number of Hungarians are fleeing into Hungary to escape the draft.
The Croat Democratic Union is also against the war. The situation in Vojvodina is on the boil and could have unforeseen political consequences. * THE NOW completed break-up
The Yugoslav trade unions and the war of the Yugoslav federation and the rise of nationalism has not spared the trade union movement.* Nonetheless the 1980s — a decade in which, for the first time since the war, the population saw its real living standards decline — saw significant strike waves in every republic. Over the past decade, the austerity demanded by the IMF to facilitate the repayment of Yugoslavia's foreign debt has weighed down on employment and wages, without resolving the basic problems of the system.
With unemployment running at more than 10% and hyper-inflation which reached a peak of 1,500% in 1989, the values of "self-management socialism" have been discredited. Inequality and divisions between regions have grown. Nationalism has provided a means of blaming others for the crisis and a distorted form of power struggle. It is also the product of the lack of openness and democracy of Tito's regime, despite several decades of socio-economic advances. expansionist logic." CATHERINE SAMARY
1U02
PLANTU
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International Viewpoint #218 • December 9, 1991
YUGOSLAVIA
F ORMALLY, the Confederation
of Independent Trade Unions of Yugoslavia (the continuation of the former official trade unions) still exists. Dragan Radulovic, a member of the Federation's council, met me in the offices of the Dom Sindikata (the House of the Unions) in what is still called Marx-Engels Square in Belgrade - there is thus so far no question of changing the name
"The unions will play a new role from now on", Radulovic told me. they were a very peculiar type of sociopolitical organization. Now it is a question of defending social interests in a pluralist framework, including as far as unions are concerned." The representative of the Serbian unions who was present specified:
"It could be said that the union was a transmission belt for the party, even in a the self-management system, since, it was said, 'workers cannot go on strike against themselves'. Since 1988 strikes have been legal." In reality union pluralism exist alongside the old unions, which have been transformed to differing degrees in the different republics. Independent unions have appeared.
Unions demand resignation of Serbian government
But do links remain between unions in different republics? The Confederation official avoided directly answering this question:
"The role of the Confederation is to support the common positions of its affiliated members and oppose the violent solution of conflicts and the violation of the constitution. At the end of February we demanded the resignation of the Federal government, from a worker and union standpoint.
"In July our confederation proposed a peace conference to all unions including those not affiliated with us). However in practice the Slovene and Croat unions did not take part in the preparation of that conference." From which I gathered
To my questions on the war and the line on the issue of the sovereignty of the republics, the Confederation representative put forward in a rather reserved manner the usual line from the Serb authorities: "There is a war between the Croatian authorities and the local Serb population. This is the main cause of the armed conflicts in Croatia."
But the Croat unions have solidarized with their republic's government and suspend the right to strike for the duration of the war. What about the Serbian unions?
"Serbia is not at war", replies a leader of the confederation, Slavomir Milosav-
"we are furthermore currently involved in a teachers' strike." When, in this regard, I mention a conflict underway in Kosovo (an Albanian-populated province of Serbia, whose autonomy has been stripped away by Slobodan Milosevic's regime) where to my knowledge many students have been unable to study owing to the massive purge of Albanian teachers, the reply is "everyone has the right to be taught in their mother tongue, but there must be only one syllabus." which in France insists that children of immigrants learn about "our ancestors the Gauls" is here applied to Kosovo, a region where 90% of the inhabitants are not Slav. This is also an aspect of the smouldering war. Looking to the future, the "Great Serb" logic shows itself when the ethnic identity of Macedonians and Bosnian Muslims is questioned by my interlocutors. Sure of themselves, they add: "But do you people in France accept the notion of a Corsican people?" There can be no doubt that Jacobin France is a model frequently cited by the partisans of a Yugoslavia united as one people, by force if necessary.
Are inter-ethnic relations better in the ("Independence") is the name of one such union, formed on May 25 this year in Belgrade. Branislav Canak, a journal-
Belgrade radio and television, spoke to me about the main branch of this union, in the media. A ferocious war is taking place at this level, with each government presenting its fanaticized vision of the conflict, whipping up hate between nations, and exploiting the memories and fears of the past. This the close links that exist between this union and the antiwar movements, which, notably in Serbia, struggle with difficulty against the chauvinist propaganda: "We do not want to be a part of this war" the journalist tells
Giving courage and protecting civilization