'This is not our war'
National minorities in Vojvodina amid the wars of the 1990s.
Below is a read-aloud version of the entire article.
Ivo Martinović was born and raised in Petrovaradin, a town now part of Novi Sad, the capital of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in northern Serbia. Martinović — part of the Croat national minority — lived in Petrovaradin with his family until autumn 1991, when he decided to emigrate to Croatia because of the various forms of pressure, intimidation and occasional open violence that his community faced as Serbia waged war in Croatia.
“Vojvodina is a specific environment, not only for the former Yugoslavia but also for the whole of Europe. It was a positive example of how it was possible for different religious, national and all other forms of community to coexist in a small space,” Martinović recalled for the website Neispričane priče — Untold Stories, in English. “Unfortunately, that bothered someone, that identity of Vojvodina,” he said
Martinović’s life story is one of many that were recorded and published on Untold Stories. The website was launched by Vojvodina Civic Center, a nongovernmental and nonprofit organization, to highlight widespread human rights abuses in Vojvodina in the 1990s.
Abuse and forced mobilization of ‘ineligible citizens’
Many abuses from the 1990s were directed toward national minorities in the province. These minorities — Hungarians, Croats, Rusyns and others — faced pressure to assimilate, participate in the war on Serbia’s side or leave Serbia altogether in light of rising Serbian nationalism. Untold Stories focuses on the personal experiences of the Croat population, part of which was expelled from Vojvodina during the war years, seen as “ineligible citizens” by certain authorities and extreme and nationalist public voices.
In the interview with Untold Stories, Martinović noted that Vojvodina, “because of its constitution, because of different religious and national minorities, a lot of mixed marriages, was one of the places that hindered the implementation of the Great Serbian policy, and as such needed to be ‘cleaned.’” This supposed cleaning manifested later, through the course of the Yugoslav wars, not only in a political but also physical sense.
Martinović remembered that propaganda in Serbian media portrayed Vojvodina’s Croats as the “extended arm” of then-President of Croatia Franjo Tuđman’s nationalistic policies in Croatia. Fears were spread about the Croat population, particularly in the Srem region of Vojvodina, preparing an armed rebellion against the government and other locals. Yet “that never happened,” said Martinović. Instead, “it was shown how artificial and created it [that narrative] all was.”
The spread of hatred wasn’t limited to the media landscape but escalated into verbal abuse and physical violence carried out by members of the local community, paramilitary formations or extremist political parties. “A bomb was thrown at our neighbor, who was a single mother of five children, four of whom were female, onto the garage that was part of their house. It was clear that she could not endanger anyone in such a situation, it is good that she was able to survive at all, to feed those children,” recalled Martinović.
Another source of constant pressure for both the Serb and non-Serb populations during the war years was the threat of forced mobilization. While some volunteers joined the Yugoslav People’s Army or paramilitary formations — which were conducting the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and later in Kosovo — many others wanted to avoid conscription, even if it meant hiding from the public eye for months or even years. It was especially difficult for Croats who, if conscripted, faced the prospect of shooting at family members or friends in Vukovar or other war zones.
Martinović had many Serb friends who were sent to fight in Croatia. When they returned home for a weekend or a few free days, he could “see that these people have changed psychologically, that they have fallen into depression, to put it mildly. Now it would be called post-traumatic syndrome.”
Martinović recalled in his testimony for Untold Stories that the military police would raid the houses of young men called up for mobilization, even if their parents said their sons were not at home. One of his friends was taken out of the wardrobe where he was hiding directly to the frontline, without a chance to change his clothes or say goodbye to his family.
Despite all the pressures, Martinović was determined to stay in Petrovaradin as long as he could. But as he realized that his chances of avoiding mobilization were growing thinner, Martinović decided to move to Croatia. Because eastern Croatia, which borders Serbia, was a war zone, he had to travel through Bosnia and Herzegovina. He told Untold Stories that while he was leaving Srem on his way to Bosnia, he “witnessed an endless row of tanks, military vehicles, which were heading towards Vukovar.” He also saw “people in the villages of Srem who came out on the roads, holding bottles of brandy, cheerfully greeting the passing army, I guess wanting to kill as many people as possible.”
Not long after, in May 1992, Martinović’s parents and sister, who initially remained in Petrovaradin, decided to move to Zagreb too. They faced constant harassment over the telephone and Serbian nationalists came in front of their house threatening them to leave since their son was “in Croatia and slaughtering Serbs,” as they put it.
While remaining in Zagreb, Martinović worked with the Community of expelled Croats from Srem, Banat and Bačka, a humanitarian organization. The organization did not act politically. Instead, it sought “to help tens of thousands of people who emigrated to find their way there, to get papers because it was not easy in those wartime circumstances to move to a new environment,” Martinović told Untold Stories.
The majority of those expelled were Croats. However, Hungarians, Serbs, other nationalities and people in mixed marriages were also present. “We had to help them,” said Martinović.
From propaganda to open violence
Martinović’s story is emblematic of the systemic repression of Croats and other national minorities in Vojvodina during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. As competing nationalism rose in the 1980s across former Yugoslavia, simultaneous narrative(s) of Serb exceptionalism and victimization gained popular support and eventually dominated public discourse. In the Serb nationalist worldview, all other nationalities in former Yugoslavia were considered hostile toward the Serb population and examples from historical conflicts were used to initiate or strengthen mistrust and intolerance toward other groups.
In northern Serbia, it was easiest to spread hatred toward Croats by evoking memories of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), a Nazi puppet state during World War II. The Ustash de a regime of the NDH not only occupied Srem, but created and ran Jasenovac, a concentration camp where approximately 77,000 to 99,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma and communists were murdered.
The painful memories of Jasenovac were easy to exploit and the media pushed narratives equating the tyranny of the NDH with the politics of all Croats. The far-right politics of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), which was the ruling party in 1990s Croatia and appropriated elements of Ustasha imagery and ideology, only made the propaganda task easier for many Serbian media outlets.
HDZ remains the ruling party in Croatia today, and although it underwent a major restructuring, in 2024, it formed a government coalition with the Homeland Movement, a far-right entity whose controversies include war-crime denials and the use of Nazi-era chants.
As the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade notes, citing census data in 1991 and 2002, the share of Croats in Vojvodina during the 11 years decreased in 39 out of 45 municipalities. There were 18,262 fewer Croats by the end of this 11-year period, a decrease of 24.41% of the overall Croat population.
In a written statement to K2.0, Marijana Stojčić, a researcher at the Center for Public History, an association of human rights activists and historians in Belgrade, argued that the change in Vojvodina’s ethnic structure manifested as a consequence of the process of dehumanization of others that had been occurring since the nationalist mobilization in Serbia from the end of the 1980s. “The Yugoslav wars were in many ways wars against minorities,” Stojčić said. “The violence and crimes during the 90s were prepared and then justified by the threat to and self-defense of ‘us’ against all those who questioned such postulated ethnonational unity.”
Stojčić observed that the nationalist discourse of the 1990s reduced politics to a binary distinction between friends and enemies and promoted intolerance towards any diversity — ethnic, religious, gender and political. “The atmosphere of existential threat that was being created imposed as a logical necessity the insistence on homogenization and encouraged further mobilization to deal with those designated as enemies by the power elite,” said Stojčić. “Yesterday’s friends, neighbors and relatives became enemies just because their names were different. We know the results: persecution, ethnic cleansing and a change in the demographic picture of Yugoslav territories, including Vojvodina.”
Sombor: a case study
A similar trend can be observed moving from the provincial level to the level of individual cities or municipalities. An article by the Center for Public History traces the position of religious and national minorities in Sombor during the 1990s. Sombor is an important case study, as it has been a multicultural and multiethnic city for centuries, dating back to the Austro-Hungarian period, like the rest of Vojvodina. Nonetheless, it followed the trend of homogenization during the Yugoslav wars.
According to censuses carried out at the beginning of three decades — in 1981, 1991 and 2002 — the overall population of Sombor stayed almost unchanged, oscillating between 96,000 and 99,000. However, the number of Croats decreased from 15,228 in 1981 to 8,106 in 2002. The number of Hungarians living in Sombor went from 18,813 to 12,386 during the same period, while the number of Serbs increased from 46,957 to 59,799.
The Serb population’s increase can be attributed to several factors, the most prominent being the voluntary or forced migration of Serbs from war zones in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. But other underlying factors point to the political change of the period. While the number of self-identified Yugoslavs stood at 14,058 in 1981, it was only 5,098 in 2002. This was not merely a reaction to a disappearing country but the loss of a need for a shared, common identity above ethnic belonging.
As in the rest of Vojvodina, national tensions flared up in Sombor as propaganda accelerated at the start of the 1990s and everyday life grew increasingly militarized by the onset of the Yugoslav wars. A number of instances of threats or open violence were recorded in Sombor, including pressure on the local Catholic community.
On December 31, 1991, a bomb was detonated inside the courtyard of the Church of Saint Stephen the King. It caused material damage but did not kill anyone. On June 16, 1992, a group of three males, one of whom was a minor, broke into the Catholic church in Kljajićevo village and killed an 82-year-old janitor of German ethnicity. Though many people, including journalists and local citizens, condemned the attack, similar instances continued nonetheless. The Sombor newspaper, Somborske Novine, reported on both incidents and its commentators were among those who condemned the attacks, and the Center of Public History’s article traces the chronology of such violent attacks in detail.
The Hungarian community of Sombor faced similar repression to that faced by the Croat population. Many Hungarians were involved in the anti-war movement and advocated for freedom from forced mobilization.
On April 23, 1992, the League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina, a political party, organized a public discussion at Sombor’s city hall on the forced mobilization of Hungarians and rising poverty in Vojvodina, among other topics. The discussion was interrupted by a group of around 20 armed men, who appeared together with local representatives of the Serbian Radical Party — perhaps the most far-right party — and saw the event as a secessionist gathering. They sang patriotic songs and shouted “Everyone out or we’ll drop the bomb! Go to Hungary!”
The silent millennial generation
Just like Croats and many other minorities, Hungarians have been an autochthonous population of Vojvodina for centuries. After the end of World War II, around half a million Hungarians lived in Vojvodina. During the period of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the peoples of Vojvodina gained legal rights. At that time, Hungary was not an economically attractive country, so the majority of Hungarians chose to stay in Yugoslavia. This meant that the number of Hungarians in Vojvodina remained stable. After the upheaval of the 1990s and its aftermath, the number of Hungarians in Vojvodina decreased to 182,321, according to the 2022 census, a drop of roughly 60% from the post-World War II number.
As the mobilization of citizens in the first phase of the Yugoslav wars accelerated across the country, Hungarian settlements in Vojvodina were especially hard hit. After a large number of Hungarians were called as reservists in October 1991, a wave of pacifist protests occurred in villages and towns populated by Hungarians, many of them embracing the slogan “This is not our war.” By May 1992, around 25,000 Hungarians emigrated to Hungary and families who fled mobilization were deprived of their inheritance rights in Serbia. After the wars and the fall of Slobodan Milošević in 2000, the flow of immigration to Hungary remained steady, as Serbia continued struggling economically and Hungary was in the process of joining the European Union (EU), opening up the possibility of an EU passport to many ethnic Hungarians from Vojvodina.
The repression Hungarians faced during the Yugoslav wars and their aftermath had a long-lasting effect on the local community. In 2023, researcher Karolina Lendák-Kabók observed that ethnic Hungarian millennials born in the 1980s might be the group most adversely yet indirectly affected by the Yugoslav wars. They were the first generation not to remember the welfare state of socialist Yugoslavia, yet their parents’ wartime plight often created traumas that were passed down over generations.
The people Lendák-Kabók interviewed noted that their most prominent childhood scars partially stemmed from the fact that their fathers were recruited into the army, even if they were called just as reservists. One respondent remembered how her father tried to avoid mobilization. “I remember that we were also taught that, if someone rings the bell at our gate and an unknown person asks for him, we say that he is not at home — that he has moved away,” she recalled. “I don’t remember how he was finally recruited. When we got Hungarian citizenship, he said that he was through with Serbia, he couldn’t live here anymore and left. He never came back.”
The war fundamentally altered the family life of ethnic Hungarians born in Vojvodina in the 1980s. For those who stayed in Serbia but whose fathers emigrated abroad to avoid mobilization, long-term separation was part of their coming of age. Some children or teenagers of the period spent months or even years apart from their fathers, often staying in touch only by telephone. Others, whose fathers took part in the war, experienced how they became more violent because of the traumas from the frontline.
One interviewee whose father was away with the army for a year noted how her father, a man with a smile she had known from her childhood, changed for the worse. “I remember once my sister and I sprayed water from the well with the help of a rubber hose. We were very loud, my dad started yelling at us out of the blue,” she told Lendák-Kabók. The aggressive behavior of her father was first unexplainable to the interviewee, but she later realized how it was related to his war trauma.
Even families that were not directly affected by the war were caught up in the economic devastation of the 1990s, as the internationally imposed sanctions and hyperinflation took hold. Many respondents in Lendák-Kabók’s study noted that they faced extreme poverty, which endangered their existence and left a long-term mark on their well-being and confidence. Those early life experiences and the ongoing sense of insecurity contributed to further migration to Hungary and Western countries even when the wars ended and the overall situation improved.
View from the Rusyn community
The life story of Ljubomir Nagy, an agriculturalist in Ruski Krstur — a Rusyn-majority town in Bačka — is another example of how the wars indirectly yet substantially affected the lives of Vojvodina’s peoples. Nagy told K2.0 that his regular military service in the Yugoslav People’s Army ended in January 1991, just five months before the Yugoslav wars broke out. Because he served at the border unit in Gjakova, Kosovo, he was exempt from any reservist service.
But he remembers that the approaching wars and national tensions were felt even during his peace-time military service. “Since soldiers from all republics served then, disagreement, insult-throwing and divisions occurred. There was already talk about extending [military service], but we were not affected by it,” he said.
Nagy remembers the first national tensions during his service in Gjakova. “They started first as a joke, as something silly. Although until that moment we were all comrades and friends, then it started getting more and more serious. Soldiers of all nationalities began to separate into groups.”
After his return to Ruski Krstur, Nagy and his immediate family and friends were not directly affected by the war. He described the situation in town as relatively peaceful. “There was no nationalism from the Rusyn side, nor was there from the majority-Serb side,” Nagy said. “There were some minor quibbles, there were some insults from ordinary people, but that was minor.”
Yet the sanctions, hyperinflation and the overall abysmal economy had a long-lasting effect on Ruski Krstur, a largely agricultural town. “The people in Krstur are hardworking and dedicated, so they continued on, but it was obvious right from the start that all the agricultural products were losing their value,” Nagy remembered. “The economic profitability of agriculture was getting weaker, that is, we were working for nothing.”
Nagy believes that the war and the following economic crisis contributed to the shrinking of Ruski Krstur’s population, as many Rusyns subsequently emigrated mostly to Western Europe and Canada in search of better working and living conditions.
Multiculturalism endangered
The trend of depopulation of Vojvodina today, just as it is across Serbia, is steady and affects all national communities. Between the censuses in 2011 and 2022, Vojvodina lost 182,453 citizens, over 9% of its population. Novi Sad was the only city whose population increased during this period. While the negative rate of natural increase is an underlying factor in this process, economic and political migration continues to play a large role.
However, national minorities are still being hit harder in this demographic process than the general population. This reality can also be observed in the Slovak community, which has also played an important and unique role in the history and cultural life of Vojvodina. While the number of Slovaks in 2011 stood at 50,321, it decreased to 39,807 in 2022, a drop of 21%. Since most members of the community are eligible for Slovakian citizenship, thereby receiving an EU passport, migration and the search for better economic opportunities abroad are easier for them than for the Serb population.
Vojvodina is still a largely multicultural and multiethnic province; a third of its citizens are a part of minority communities. The province’s constitution recognizes six official languages: Serbian, Hungarian, Slovakian, Croatian, Romanian and Rusyn, making it a rare if not unique region in Europe with so many languages in official use. But with accelerated immigration to Western countries and the rise of the threat of assimilation as minority communities shrink, experts wonder if Vojvodina will lose some of the 25 minority communities that currently live there in the coming decades.
The vulnerability of Vojvodina’s multiculturalism is partly a consequence of the policies carried out by the Serbian government in the 1990s and the repression that national minorities faced back then. Although the majority of legal rights of national minorities were restored in the 2000s, Serbia never truly examined the crimes, propaganda and hatred directed at Vojvodina’s peoples during the war.
After the economic devastation of the 1990s, small cities, towns and villages populated by the minority population never fully recovered and Serbia did not invest enough to create a sufficient local economy in those places that would motivate people to remain working and living there. The shadow of the Yugoslav wars continues to linger over many members of national minority communities, at least over those who decide to remain in Vojvodina.
About the author:
Borisav Matić graduated in dramaturgy at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad and is currently attending the master’s program of cultural studies at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad. He is a cultural critic, dramaturg and journalist whose journalistic work and arts criticism often focus on the intersection of politics and culture. He has written or edited pieces about culture and arts for a range of publications and media. He is a member of the regional feminist collective of literary critics Rebel Readers.
