The international community is divided in regard to recognition of the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as the successor state to the former Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia, a constitutional republic, is dominated by Slobodan Miloevic,
who is serving his second term as president of Serbia. President Miloevic
controls the country through the Socijalisticka Partija Srbije (SPS, Socialist
Party of Serbia), which, although it lacks majorities in both the federal
and Serbian parliaments, controls governing coalitions and holds the key
administrative positions.
Despite the suspension of UN sanctions against Serbia-Montenegro in December
1995, economic performance was anaemic in 1996. Unemployment and underemployment
remained high as the government was unable and unwilling to introduce necessary
restructuring measures. Industrial production, hampered by a lack of investment
capital, averaged only 30 per cent of capacity. By the end of the year,
a typical family of four required 2.2 times the average wage to obtain sufficient
food. Largely as a result of the central bank's tight monetary policy, hyper-inflation
was avoided.
In November, allegations of malpractice in municipal elections held in Serbia
provoked mass demonstrations and protests against the government, the largest
witnessed in Serbia since the crushing of anti-government protests in 1991.
There is no significant tradition of antisemitism in the former Yugoslav federation (see Croatia).
Ethnic Albanians continued to suffer at the hands of security forces
conducting searches for arms. According to some reports, over 3,000 ethnic
Albanians were mistreated, many severely beaten, in the first six months
of 1996. Other observers say that the situation improved in 1996.
Government policy towards refugees and asylum-seekers continued to be uneven.
Refugees are often treated as citizens of Serbia-Montenegro for labour and
military purposes but are denied other rights such as employment and travel.
The government has co-operated with the UN High Commission for Refugees
(UNHCR) to provide help for the more than 600,000 refugees in Serbia-Montenegro.
The Roma population is generally toler-ated, and there is no official discrimination.
Roma have the right to vote, and there are two small Roma parties. However,
prejudice against Roma is widespread, and local authorities often ignore
or condone societal intimidation of the Roma community.
The Srpska Radikalna Stranka (SRS, Serbian Radical Party) is a populist
neo-fascist organization along the lines of Vladimir Zhirinovsky's and Jean-Marie
Le Pen's parties (see Russia, France). It is led by Vojislav Seselj. In
federal and local elections held in November 1996 the SRS won some 700,000
votes, ranking third in terms of votes after the two major coalitions. The
number of members of the party is unknown. During recent visits by Zhirinovsky
and Le Pen to Belgrade at the invitation of the SRS, no antisemitic statements
are known to have been made.
A splinter of the SRS is led by Sinisa Vucinic, a former leader of the Serbian
royalist movement who in 1992-3 made public statements calling for the confiscation
of property belonging to communists and Jews. Vucinic is not known to have
said anything along these lines subsequently, and his splinter group fully
supports the Miloevic government.
The Svetosavska Stranka (SS, Saint Sava Party), headed by the retired Orthodox
priest Zarko Gavrilovic, plays no more than a marginal role. It is based
in Belgrade and has few members. Its ideology consists of Greater Serb nationalism
and religious fundamentalism.
The skinhead movement has several hundred members and has connections with
similar movements abroad. Most skinheads in Yugoslavia are aged between
fifteen and twenty-five, and most live in Belgrade. One of the slogans they
have displayed is "Death to the Jews".
In terms of intensity, antisemitic incidents differed little from the
previous year.
On 22 January, the wall of the Jewish cemetery in Belgrade was daubed with
such slogans as "Out with the Jewish-Masonic Serb-haters", "We
Don't Want a Dayton Pax Judaica" and "Jews, You are a Minority
in Serbia".
On 26 September, leaflets entitled "Evil Jewish Vaccine kills Muslim
Children" and bearing a death's-head appeared in the streets of Novi
Pazar, a town in southern Serbia with a large Muslim population. The leaflets
called on parents to boycott the vaccination of their children against smallpox
and other children's diseases. The author(s) of the leaflets could not be
traced.
On several occasions during the year anonymous leaflets, pamphlets, poems
and suchlike containing antisemitic messages were mailed to a number of
Jews, including Aca Singer, the president of the Federation of Jewish Communities
in Yugoslavia.
On 17 February and 1 March the illustrated fortnightly magazine Duga
, which occasionally publishes sensationalist material, contained articles
by Zarko Gavrilovic (see PARTIES, ORGANIZATIONS, MOVEMENTS), who declared
that there could be no discussion of religious tolerance until Jews and
Muslims rejected specific statements in their holy books. He said that the
Talmud contained, among other things, the statement: "Every goy
who studies the Talmud and every Jew who helps him to do so should die."
In autumn a new book by Ratibor Djurdevic appeared. Djurdevic, now in his
eighties, was during the Second World War a propagandist for the Serbian
Quisling regime; he escaped at the end of the war and emigrated to the USA,
where he became a clinical psychologist. He returned to Serbia in 1992.
In the autumn of 1996 the Belgrade publishing house of which Gavrilovic
is a director (see above), published a fifty-two-page booklet entitled "The
Meaninglessness of Antisemitism and Anti-Anti-Semitism". The booklet
dealt with polemics concerning Djurdevic's book US Patriots, Victims
of the ZOG [Zionist Occu-pation Government]: The Dark Underside of
Democracy, which was published in the USA.
Also in the autumn, the collected works of the late Nikolaj Velimirovic
were published. Velimirovic, a Serbian Orthodox bishop, was known for his
fundamentalist views. Held under "honourable arrest" (Ehrenhaft
) by the Germans in the Second World War, he wrote a number of works
during his imprisonment, including a rabidly anti-Jewish one. The latter
was included in his ten-volume collected works published in 1996 and widely
publicized by the publishing house The Voice of the Church. There has been
a campaign to canonize Velimirovic as a saint.
The official Serbian Orthodox church maintains a positive attitude towards Jews and Jewish issues and does not fail officially to denounce antisemitic incidents, whether in individual cases or in general. However, the church is not monolithic and there are a number of clergymen who hold antisemitic views and are followers of Nikolaj Velimirovic (see PUBLICATIONS AND MEDIA). They have some influence among students of the theological faculty in Belgrade (not readmitted as part of Belgrade University).
On 6 October, the daily newspaper Nasa Borba carried an article
by the independent intellectual Ivan Colovic, who criticized Durdjevic's
books (see PUBLICATIONS AND MEDIA) as being "anti-civilization".
In October, the Forum for Ethnic Relations held in Belgrade a meeting entitled
"Xenophobia, Chauvinism, Antisemitism and Racism in Yugoslavia".
Numerous participants pleaded for tolerance in this field, and Jewish community
representative Aca Singer read a paper on countering antisemitism.
In November, the Belgrade publisher Matica Srpska brought out a Serbo-Croat
version version of Warrant for Genocide , the well-known book by
Norman Cohn that traces the history of the forgery The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion. The Yugoslav Jewish community sent copies of the book
to several hundred political, cultural, religious and other public figures.
As in previous years, antisemitism is no more than a marginal issue in Serbia-Montenegro. Nevertheless, there is concern that, in particular, a number of antisemitic publications continue to appear and that isolated cases of anti-Jewish sentiment are to be found among Orthodox clergy.
Institute for Jewish Policy Research and American Jewish Committee
© JPR 1997