As Violence Spreads, Hungarians in Serbian Province Fear They Are Next : Balkans: Northern area of Vojvodina could be the next venue of ‘ethnic cleansing.’ The rich farming region is already seeing the danger signs.

Corn and cabbages grow within the walled German Cemetery and ivy carpets other toppled monuments of the Austro-Hungarian era that were destroyed by triumphant Serbs after this century’s earlier wars.

But fresher evidence of nationalist vandalism can also be found throughout the hallowed graveyard where Vojvodina’s multiethnic population has buried its dead for hundreds of years.

Tombstones with names like Kovacs, Nemeth and Nagy have been smashed or spray-painted with Serbian national symbols. A cross erected in the memory of ethnic Hungarian civilian victims of World War II has been vandalized and removed by order of the city government of Novi Sad.

While most observers of the Balkan conflict warily watch Kosovo province for the next violent outbreak, concern is growing that Serbia’s agriculturally rich northern province of Vojvodina could be the next venue of looting and “ethnic cleansing.” Some even fear that an end to the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, less than 40 miles away, could be the catalyst for shifting the conflict here.

“There are these armed bands for whom the war has become a lifestyle--killing, raping and looting. When it is over in Bosnia, they will lose their jobs,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Geza Jeszenszky said in an interview. “When there are no more crimes to be committed there, they will move on. Most people think Kosovo faces the biggest danger, but I’m not so sure. . . . Vojvodina is still a relatively rich region, which makes it an inviting target.”

More than 35,000 ethnic Hungarians in Vojvodina have already fled to neighboring Hungary after being fired from jobs or menaced by Serbian nationalists. Some authorities fear an even larger exodus is about to flow north as the remaining 350,000 ethnic Hungarians face the twin forces of harassment and newfound economic hardships resulting from international sanctions aimed at Serbs.

Serbian leaders officially deny that there are issues or potential problems in Vojvodina. But the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party holds sway over most of Vojvodina, and its leader, accused war criminal Vojislav Seselj, has ominously suggested that the province’s ethnic Hungarians should leave the country now if they want to escape in peace.

Seselj is one of a number of Serbian warlords whose heavily armed paramilitary gangs have been terrorizing Bosnia.

Ethnic Hungarians, who are the largest minority among Vojvodina’s 2 million residents, say they feel threatened by the aggressive Serbian nationalists wielding power in the region.

“I only feel comfortable speaking Serbo-Croatian in public,” said Nandor Gogos, 66, a retired post office worker. “This is very sad for me, because Vojvodina used to be a trilingual society, with Hungarian and German given equal place with Serbo-Croatian. My granddaughters don’t know a word of Hungarian, and there is nothing I can do about it.”

Sociologist Karoly Mirnic, fired from his job at the Serbian statistical office two years ago, accuses the Serbian-nationalist regime installed by Belgrade of deliberately seeking to erase all vestiges of Hungarian culture from the region.

“We are encouraging people to stay, despite the pressures, because if Hungarians leave, there will be no others to come and take their place, and this region that has been part of our history will be lost forever,” Mirnic said, claiming Belgrade authorities have been trying to resettle Bosnian Serb refugees here to bolster their claim that Vojvodina belongs in an emerging all-Serbian state.

Like the predominantly Albanian province of Kosovo to the south, Vojvodina was stripped of its former autonomy by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic two years ago. The directives suspending the provincial parliaments and imposing state control over all media have served to disenfranchise minority political parties and encourage extremists like Seselj.

Hungarian activists point to newly broken headstones at the cemetery, stifled Hungarian newspapers and defaced signs as evidence of Serbian repression.

Many ordinary people shrink with fear at any stranger’s approach and refuse to discuss the regional tensions. “We don’t want any trouble. You know the situation as well as we do,” said one elderly Hungarian man cleaning up a vandalized grave site.

His wife looked apologetic when asked what they had experienced. “Sorry, but it’s better to be silent,” she said, making a locking motion over her lips.

Signs of Hungarian culture were once abundant in Vojvodina, part of Austria-Hungary until Yugoslavia was formed at the end of World War I. Its population reflected the empire’s ethnic patchwork of Hungarians, Germans, Serbs, Croats, Czechs and numerous others until World War II brought a vicious series of betrayals and retaliations.

Some German and Hungarian officials sided with Nazi invaders and their puppet regimes, inspiring mass revenge killings after Marshal Tito’s Communist partisans defeated the fascist forces.

In the oldest section of the cemetery, used as a garbage dump until 1990, the Democratic Union of Vojvodina Hungarians has repeatedly restored a memorial to the nearly 40,000 Hungarian civilians killed by the partisans and Serbian nationalists in 1944. Each time the wooden Catholic cross has been erected, vandals have destroyed it within days, along with dozens of other headstones and memorials of non-Serbian civilians.

Despite increasingly clear threats from the nationalists and the tragic experience of Bosnia, Hungarian political leaders express an incomprehensible confidence that the Western world would never tolerate their suffering a nationalist scourge.

“For a long time, there has been a lot of psychological and physical pressure on us, and now the authorities are openly pushing us to leave the country,” said Ferenc Papp, Novi Sad leader of the Democratic Union of Vojvodina Hungarians. “But they will not succeed. We are part of Central Europe, and the international community would not allow us to be driven out.”

Mirnic likewise insists conflict cannot spread here “because if it did, the war would become an international problem. . . . To drive us out across an international border would be a fatal mistake of the regime.”

But Hungary no longer belongs to any military alliance and has fewer than 50,000 soldiers in its fledgling post-Communist army.

Jeszenszky declined to discuss what he termed “hypothetical questions,” such as how Hungary would be affected by a sudden influx of Vojvodina Hungarians if nationalist paramilitary gangs turn their sights on this province.

“I can say only that Hungary is not in a position to be seen as a threat by any of our neighbors,” the foreign minister said. “At most, we are capable of deterring a possible aggressor for a few hours or days . . . until United Nations or other international help comes.”

He made clear Hungary would consider the forced displacement of Vojvodina Hungarians a provocation, and he claimed to be confident the Belgrade leadership would not risk cutting one of its last links to the outside world.

Since U.N. economic sanctions were imposed on the rump Yugoslavia in May, 1992, in punishment for Belgrade’s role in fomenting violence in Bosnia, most telecommunications and travel have been routed through Hungary, which is also the only country in Europe that does not require visas from Yugoslavs.

But social workers on both sides of the border warn that politics is not the only impetus for a mass migration. Like the rest of Yugoslavia, Vojvodina is about to confront a second winter of fuel and food shortages brought on by Belgrade’s military spending and the biting U.N. sanctions.

Andras Agoston, Vojvodina’s Hungarian community leader, recently wrote to Hungarian President Arpad Goncz advising Budapest to prepare transit camps for about 40,000 children and old people at risk of freezing to death for lack of heat. “We are bracing for a huge influx of refugees this winter, as much from the economic situation as from political causes,” said Eszter Legrady of the Hungarian Red Cross.

She pointed to Hungary’s own economic woes as it recovers from 40 years of communism in contending that a massive arrival of refugees would force Hungary to appeal to the West for help.

Western diplomats in Belgrade observe that Hungary would be well within its rights to expect assistance from wealthier Western countries that have put up barriers to the Balkan displaced.

But they see little evidence that Western European governments feel responsible for the care of Yugoslav war victims, whose plight some concede is a consequence of the West’s failure to punish Serbian-nationalist aggression before it flared out of control and helped to spark a seemingly intractable Balkan war.