Serbian atrocities against Hungarians

On 8 October 1944, Tito’s partisans, in the wake of the advancing Soviet forces, executed 500 Hungarians at Péterréve (Petrovo Selo), south of Zenta (Senta). The Serbian ethnocide started in earnest on 18 October 1944, when the ethnic Hungarians and Germans were rounded up into forty - one con centration camps, where many of them perished. During this campaign of retaliation by the Serb partisans, 40,000 to 50,000 Hungarians, including women and children, were executed without any judicature simply because they were Hungarians. The mass execution of “collaborating” Hungarian leaders took place in Szabadka on 30 October 1944. Also in the fall of 1944 massacres occurred in Újvidék, Szenttamás, 30 km north of Újvidék when returning Serbian army units in a few days rounded up 3,000 Hungarian men and executed them. In the same month in the Zsablya region the Serbian partisans rounded up fifty Hungarians daily, killing them by machine - gun fire and tossing their bodies into mass graves. There has been not one Hungarian in Zsablya for some time while in 1941 there were 8,526. During the autumn of 1944 in the pogrom of Adorján, at a treacherously convoked civic meeting held in the village square, the assembled Hungarian men, women and children were massacred by the armed Serbian terrorists. Many of the Hungarian population of Temerin were killed in a mass - execution and buried in a mass grave and in Újvidék the partisan terrorists, in retaliation for the Hungarian razzia, brutally executed several hundred Hungarians.
Massacres took place also at Ada, Apatin, Bácsföldvár, Bajmok, Bezdán Csurog, Hadikliget, Horgos, Kula, Magyarkanizsa, Martonos, Mozsoly, Óbecse, Pacsér, Péterréve, Verbász, Zenta and many other places.

The destruction of Hungarian culture in Southern Hungary began with the suppression of the language. Hungarian children were forced to go to Serbian classes and the training of Hungarian teachers was suspended. The jobless Hungarians were encouraged to emigrate. By means of the agricultural reforms newcomers were settled in these depopulated areas.
Between 1944 and 1948, 385,000 hectares of land were distributed in Voivodina and Slavonia among 40,000 southern settler families (Serbs from Lika in Croatian Krajina, Bosnians, Montenegrins) numbering a total of 200,000 persons. One-tenth of the distributed land was given to 18,000 landless Hungarians.
With the exception of the Germans no large scale deportations or population exchanges took place. Yet about 30,000 Hungarians, mostly those who had served in the Hungarian army and members of their families, moved to Hungary. The influx of Serbian people into Voivodina continued with more than 500,000 newcomers settling in the province between 1953 and 1971. The influx continues to this day from the south with Serbian refugees coming from Kosovo. As a result the proportion of the Hungarian minority in the province has shrunk from the former one today, putting them in an even more desperate situation.

A new ordeal befell the Hungarians living in the former Southern Hungary (northern Yugoslavia) in the 1990s, during the Yugoslavian civil war. Far more Hungarian young men were conscripted into the army than from other ethnic groups and were sent to the most dangerous parts of the front - line. This resulted in a mass exodus of young Hungarians from Voivodina. They were followed by thousands of Hungarian families who escaped from the war zones or were forcibly evacuated from their homes that were given to Serb refugees from Kosovo. The new settlers do not generally tolerate the autochthonous Hungarian population and wish to see the latter chased out of Voivodina. To achieve this goal Serbs beat up Hungarians on the streets, in schools or in the bars, desecrating Hungarian cemeteries and threatening them on wall graffiti. There were hundreds of such cases in recent years. The European Union sent a committee to conduct an investigation into these issues.