The Democratic Alliance of Croats in Vojvodina (DSHV) on Saturday recalled the suffering of local Croats in the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina in the 1990s, and the start of the expulsion of Srijem Croats after a hate-mongering speech of war criminal Vojislav Seselj on 6 May 1992 in Hrtkovci.

Thirty-one years ago, Seselj’s Serb Radical Party (SRS) held a rally in the town of Hrtkovci at which Seselj read aloud the names of 17 prominent Croats in that community, threatening them to leave this Vojvodina town.

Seselj’s call for the expulsion of local Croats instigated large-scale persecutions of Croats, which resulted in the killing of 45 Croats and the departure of an estimated 40,000 Croats.

Three victims are still registered as missing persons.

The DSHV says that one of the tragic consequences of the developments in the last decade of the 20th century was a drastic scale-down of the ethnic Croat community in Srijem.

According to the last census in 2022, a mere 8,398 citizens identified themselves as Croats in  Serbia’s Srijem region, says the political party of local Croats.

The DSHV also criticizes the authorities for a lack of policies that will recognise the rights of local Croats to the use of their mother tongue and failure to finance their institutions.

The UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague (ICTY) convicted Seselj of war crimes against ethnic Croats in Vojvodina. However, that has not prevented him from continuing his political career, and in 2018 Seselj moved his party’s headquarters to Hrtkovci.

Ethnic Craots were expelled from  Hrtkovci, Novi Slankamen, Golubinac, Sot, Morovic, Erdevik, Kukujevci, Gibarac, Sid, Vasica, Ruma, Irig, Beska, Maradik, Indjija, Zemun, Novi Banovci, Surcin, Srijemska Kamenica, Beocin, Cerevici, Petrovaradin, Srijemski Karlovci, Srijemska Mitrovica, Nikinci, Platicevo, Martinci, Bac, Plavna, Sonta, Stanisic etc.