“Serbs” in Bela krajina: a (deliberately) forgotten minority?

Abstract

There are three constitutionally recognized national/ethnic minorities in Slovenia: the Italians, the Hungarians and the Roma. In addition, there are other ethnic groups that could perhaps be considered as “autochthonous” national minorities in line with Slovenia's understanding of this concept. Among them is a small community of “Serbs” – the successors of the Uskoks living in Bela krajina, a border region of Slovenia. In this article we present results of a field research that focused on the following question: Can the “Serb” community in Bela krajina be considered a national minority? On the basis of the objective facts, it could be said that the “Serbs” in four Bela krajina villages are a potential national minority, but with regard to their modest social vitality and the fact that they do not express their desire for minority status, the realization of special minority protection is questionable.

Keywords:

• national minorities
• minority rights
• Slovenia
• Serbs
• Bela krajina

Notes

1. In Slovenia, there is no official definition of this concept. Roter (2005, 199–200) connects “autochthony” in Slovenia to the European criterion of the preservation of long-lasting and firm ties with the country of residence, which was introduced precisely in order to differentiate traditional national minorities and immigrant communities; she describes autochthony as a Slovene expression for firm ties between the minority and the state in which the minority exists.

2. We use the expression in quotation marks because there is no unified opinion on how to name this community.

3. For more on the development of the constitutional protection of national minorities in Slovenia between 1945 and 1991, see Komac (2007a, 38–46).

4. Voting Rights Register Act (Uradni list RS, no. 1/2007), Article 22:

Citizens members of the Italian or Hungarian ethnic communities who do not reside permanently in the areas where those communities live shall be placed on the electoral register of citizens members of the Italian or Hungarian ethnic community at their written request directed at the appropriate self-governing ethnic community.

Members of the Italian and Hungarian national minorities have what is referred to as a “double voting right.” This means that they elect their own representatives for the national parliament and local governing bodies, while they also have the general voting right. Their influence on the composition of the parliament and municipal councils is thus “greater” than that of the members of the majority nation (positive discrimination). In Slovenia, the “double voting right” of the members of the Italian and Hungarian national communities is frequently the subject of criticism, although this right is based on the constitutional regulation which ensures a high level of protection of the two national communities and does not signify a violation of the principle of equality of the right to vote (Ribičič 2004, 33–34).

5. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire resulted in migrations from the Balkan Peninsula to the wider area of the Habsburg monarchy, the Republic of Venice and other parts of the present-day Italy. Numerous groups of Albanians immigrated to the territory of the present-day Italy. It is estimated that the current number of the members of the Albanian minority in Italy is around 100,000. They live in the Italian regions of Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Molise and Sicily (Lewis, Simons, and Fennig 2014). From Herzegovina and Southern Croatia, a group of Croats also crossed the Adriatic Sea in flight from the Ottomans. In the Italian region of Molise, they lived beside the Albanians. Today the “Croatian” language (or “our language,” as the Croats refer to it, is alive in only three villages (Acquaviva Collecroce, Montemitro and San Felice del Molise) (Komac 1979; Sujoldžić 2004, 264). Between 1530 and 1560, Croats also moved from different regions of Croatia and Bosnia toward the north, to the territory of the present-day Burgenland in Austria. Since 1922, they have been known as the Burgenland Croats (Gieler and Kornfeind 2003). During roughly the same time, Croats also settled on the territory of what is now Slovakia. Today, they live in four municipalities around Bratislava. Some Croats from central Croatia moved to the territory of the Czech Republic, settling in Southern Moravia, which is why they were called Moravian Croats (Lipovac 2009). Because of the Ottoman territorial expansions, Serbs also emigrated to the present-day Bosnia and the frontier regions of the Kingdom of Croatia, as well as to central Hungary (Poth 2001).

6. Due to personal data protection, it is impossible to gain this information with regard to the 2002 census.

7. The 1961 census introduced the category of “Yugoslav” for the first time. The greatest number of the inhabitants of Slovenia declared themselves to be “Yugoslavs” in the 1981 census (1.39%), while later their share decreased in 1991 to 0.63% and in 2002 only 0.03%. In the four villages dealt with in this article, the proportion of inhabitants declaring themselves as “Yugoslavs” was highest in the 1991 census (when Slovenia gained its independence) (Komac 2007b, 510–511).

8. The census was carried out only a few months prior to Slovenia's independence in what was still the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

9. The publication Krajevni leksikon Dravske banovine [Local Lexicon of the Drava Province] (1937, 120) says in connection with the appearance of the name Bojanci that the village was given this name because inhabitants of the village of Bojna had moved there. Most probably this refers to the village of Bojna in Croatia, which lies on the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina and was traditionally inhabited by Serbs.

10. The Kolpa is a border river between Slovenia and Croatia.

11. If we compare the data according to individual villages, we can see that Serbian prevailed in Marindol (67.3%) and in Miliči (78.1%). In Paunoviči, the percentage of the population stating Serbian as their mother tongue was much smaller (36.4%), but in this village the proportion of those who declared their mother tongue to be Croatian was considerably higher (27.3%). Among the inhabitants of the other three villages, a notably smaller proportion (between 0% and 4.7%) stated that their mother tongue was Croatian. In Bojanci, the proportion of Serbian-speaking population was the smallest (27.5%), but here the share of those who gave Serbo-Croatian as their mother tongue (17.6%) was much higher in comparison with that in the other villages (SORS 2005a, 2005b).

12. Today, the Vlachs are an ethnic group scattered as a minority in countries of the Balkan Peninsula (Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania). They are also known under various other names such as Aromanians, Morlachs or Tsintsars. Vlachs have pastoralist origins and lived on the territory of the Balkans before the Slav settlement in the Middle Ages. Their language and ethnic identity have traditionally adapted to geopolitical and social situations in the past, such as the Ottoman invasion in the sixteenth century (Šatava 2013, 71; Winder 2013, 121–122). Thus, the term “Vlach” evolved into a social and economic designation in the medieval period and the different meanings of the term became difficult to separate. Hence, the occasional confusion or equation between Uskoks and Vlachs, since both rendered military service against the Ottomans to the Habsburgs in exchange for autonomy and tax concessions (Bracewell 2010, 24–25). Their pastoralist origins probably had an influence on the pejorative meaning of the label “Vlachs.”

13. The freedom of choice to be treated or not treated as members of a minority was mentioned by the United Nations in 1950, and is contained in all the international documents pertaining to the protection of minorities from the 1990s.