Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-09-16-Speech-4-128"
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"en.20040916.6.4-128"2
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"Mr President, just imagine, as a Member of this House, finding a large kitchen knife pushed under your front door one day, with the accompanying message: ‘We will butcher you’. Is there anything more shocking or terrifying than this? Such was the death threat, in Serbian, that Béla Csorba, Vice-President of the Hungarian Democratic Party of Vojvodina, received on 9 April of this year.
This offence against a Member of the Hungarian minority in the Serbian province is by no means an isolated incident. Not for nothing does this draft resolution list the specific expressions of physical and mental violence, to which particularly Serbian citizens of Hungarian origin have been exposed for some time. Of how many incidents of hostility is the outside world unaware? After all, typical of the climate of fear and intimidation in Vojvodina is the desire of various victims of ethnic violence to remain anonymous.
Extensive documentation, currently available, about the present position of the Hungarian minority in Vojvodina is conjuring up a simply alarming image. If a teenager speaks Hungarian on the streets or in a public place, then they run the risk of being beaten up by a gang of their Serbian contemporaries. There is every chance that the police will look the other way or dismiss the incident soon enough as ‘not ethnically motivated’.
Equally shocking are the texts of anti-Hungarian graffiti. At the crack of dawn on 15 July 2004, a wall in the city of Novi Sad was covered in big letters which read: ‘OK, OK Hungarians, a deep mass grave awaits you’. Shortly before that, in early May, many buildings in this capital of Vojvodina were covered with graffiti asserting that ‘Serbia belongs to the Serbs; Hungarians: get lost!’
Against the background of an unmistakable radicalisation of the political climate in Vojvodina, I would underline Paragraph 5 of the draft resolution. This paragraph asks for an in-depth inquiry to be mounted on the ground by the EP delegation for south-eastern Europe. I would already like to give this fact-finding mission a number of urgent questions to take with them, questions that I would also like to address to the Council and Commission.
What is the situation with regard to language teaching and other cultural provision for the Hungarian minority in Vojvodina, including newspapers, magazines and other media? How much money does the Serbian Government set aside in total for public provision for this specific ethnic group? In short, what exactly are the minority rights of the Hungarians in Vojvodina?
Encouraging was this week’s pledge by the Council, through its Dutch Presidency, that it intends to examine the position of the minorities in Vojvodina. This House and the Commission will have no choice but to follow suit. What is decisive, however, is the attitude of the competent Serbian authorities. In the first and last instance, we would urge them to commit to human tolerance in Vojvodina."@en1
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