Notes on the emergent western Balkan route of migrants

The Guardian was one news source of more than a few to report on Hungary's plans to build a fence along its border with Serbia to keep out migrants coming from Serbia.

Hungary has ordered the closure of the EU country’s border with Serbia and the construction of a fence along the frontier to keep out migrants, the foreign minister said.

“The Hungarian government has instructed the interior ministry to physically close the border with Serbia,” Péter Szijjártó told reporters on Wednesday.

He said the ministry had been ordered to “begin preparation work for a four-metre-high fence along the length of Hungary’s 175km [110-mile] border with Serbia.”

[. . .]

Serbia is not yet a member of the European Union, though it has started accession talks, while Hungary is part of the European Union’s passport-free Schengen zone. This means that, once in Hungary, migrants can easily travel onwards to other countries in the zone.

Last year, Hungary received more migrants per capita than any other EU country apart from Sweden, with the number shooting up to almost 43,000 people from just 2,000 in 2012.

These migrants, it should be noted, are not migrants from Serbia. Substantial numbers of Serbians have moved north into Hungary, ethnic Hungarians from the Serbian border province of Vojvodina and otherwise, but their migration is not as politically controversial as others'. Most of these migrants, rather, are coming from outside of Europe, making use of a land corridor stretching from the Greek border to the Hungarian to try to get into the Schengen zone.

The western Balkans route has become prominent only recently, a consequence of other routes becoming more difficult and perhaps also of new regional crises in the eastern Mediterranean. Data from Frontex notes the surge.

The irregular migration trends in the Western Balkans region underwent rapid changes following the introduction of visa-free travel within the European Union. In just four years, the region transitioned from being largely a source country for irregular migration to mostly a transit area of irregular migrants from Greece.

In 2012, nationals from the Western Balkans were increasingly found abusing various forms of legal travel, detected either during border checks or while already in the European Union. The misuse of international protection provisions in Member States and Schengen Associated Countries was by far the most prevalent. In 2012, there were almost 33 000 asylum applications submitted by citizens of the five newly visa-exempt Western Balkan countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia and former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), or 53% more than in 2011. The number was the highest since the introduction of visa–free travel in the region and accounted for 12% of the total number of asylum applications in the European Union. Other abuses of legal travel channels were linked to overstay in the European Union. More precisely, there were roughly a fifth more detections of Western Balkans’ nationals illegally staying in Member States countries – this group included mainly Kosovars, Serbs and Albanians. The latter group was also the most commonly detected nationality using document fraud to illegally enter the European Union/Schengen area from a third country in 2012. Almost one fifth of all detections were linked to the Albanian nationality, largely using counterfeit entry/exit stamps intended to hide overstay.

The year 2013 witnessed an unprecedented increase in the migratory flow at the Hungarian-Serbian border. During this period, almost 20 000 migrants illegally crossed the Hungarian-Serbian border section and nearly all of them applied for asylum after crossing. The nationalities reflected the dual typology of this route and included residents of Kosovo, Serbian nationals but also Pakistani, Afghan, Algerian Moroccan nationals as well as sub-Saharan Africans, many of whom had been living in Greece prior to travel.

In all, detected illegal entries on this route have risen from 3090 in 2009 to 43 360 in 2014.

This route has started to acquire press coverage. Glen Johnson's report of the 22nd of April in The National ("Migrants exploited every step of the way on Balkans route to Europe"), Karin Schmidt Martinez's report at Muftag.org, or Simona Sikimic's Middle East Eye article "From Syria to Serbia: The migrants' Balkan backdoor". The below illustration of the western Balkans route comes from Sikimic's excellent piece.



The most affecting article I've come across is an Associated Press article by Dalton Bennett and Shawn Pogatchnik, published in Canada's National Post as "European dreams become nightmares: Africans seeking new life make epic trek through Balkans’ back door". The two followed a group of migrants, mainly Francophone Africans, on a nightmarish trek north through the former Yugoslavia. This is strongly recommended reading.

The walls are sweating in the safe house in Thessaloniki, Greece, a windowless basement apartment with no furnishings, two bedrooms and a camp-style cooker on the floor. It’s the end of February, and an African smuggler has brought 45 clients to this base camp to escort them on off-road paths through Macedonia to Serbia. Among the group are 11 women, including two with 10-month-old children.

The smuggler, a former soldier, agreed to allow an AP journalist to accompany them on condition he not be identified because what he’s doing is illegal.
He goes from migrant to migrant, checking their readiness for the journey to Serbia. By car, it would take less than five hours. On foot, it’s an estimated 10 days.

When some giggle at his questions, he sets a stern tone: “Shut up. This isn’t a joke once you’re out there. If you think it’s funny, I’ll send you back to Athens.”

He’s taken three other groups on the route, and charges those on this trip a wide range of prices, depending on their ability to pay but averaging around $500. Discounts apply if they help him keep the others supplied and disciplined. Kids go free.

Vojvodina's ethnic homogenization as a 21st century paradigm

Over at Balkan Insight, Tim Judah's article "Vojvodina’s Ageing Minorities Stare Extinction in The Face" provided an interesting examination about how the fourth stage of the demographic transition is leading to the disappearance of some relatively well-established ethnolinguistic minorities.

Puffing, panting and yelping in Romanian, six men are expertly dancing around three ping-pong tables. Watching intently are several more men, most of them greying and balding. There is not a woman is in sight. Perhaps they are preparing the feast to follow at which large quantities of alcohol are to be consumed. It has been a happy day for the Romanian community in Serbia, one of Vojvodina’s rapidly dying ethnic minorities.

Vojvodina is Serbia’s northern province. “Until now, we were proud to say that we had 28 nationalities here,” says Branislav Djurdjev, a demographer at Novi Sad university, “but demographic developments will destroy that.”

In the grand sweep of history Vojvodina is no stranger to population shifts. But today, as the Balkan wars of the 1990s fade into memory, few realise the dramatic nature of the demographic changes that have taken place in Vojvodina in the last two decades – and which are continuing.

Nicu Ciobanu, director of Libertatea, Serbia’s Romanian language newspaper, is proud that this is the 52nd annual ping-pong contest that his paper is sponsoring. But how many more will the newspaper be able to stage in years to come? This year’s contest is being held in the gym of the school in the village of Alibunar. Between the two world wars, about 75 per cent of the some 3,500 people who lived in Alibunar were ethnic Romanians. Now, of a population of around 3,400, only 28 per cent are Romanians. The rest are mostly Serbs.

A few steps from the school stand two white churches. Unusually for the Balkans, or indeed anywhere else, they stand side by side and are built in the same classic Vojvodina style. One is the Serbian Orthodox church while the other belongs to the Romanian Orthodox. Inside the Romanian church, chandeliers have been lowered and plastic sheeting placed over precious objects, while the church is alive to the sound of “pftt, pftt” as elderly ladies spray cleaning fluid on everything that needs polishing. The church is being prepared for an important saint’s day.

Overseeing the work is the priest, Fr Ionel Malaimare. Over the road, in the little community hall, tables have been laid for the meal that will follow the saint’s day service. On the walls are pictures dating back decades, recording generations of Romanian choirs of Alibunar. According to the census of 2002, there were 30,419 Romanians in Vojvodina, but back in 1910 there were 75,233. Numbers have been falling ever since. Ominously, for the first time, there is not a single child this year in the first year Romanian-language class in Alibunar’s school.

The most important thing to keep in mind in regards to the self-governing Serbian province of Vojvodina, located in the north of Serbia and bordering on Croatia, Hungary, and Romania, is tgat it has become increasingly Serb by population. Wikipedia's summary of the demographic history of Vojvodina is as accurate as anybody's. Over the period from 1880 to 2002, the region's population grew from 1.1 million to a bit over two million, but the region's Serb population has grown from four hundred thousand (35.5%) to 1.3 million (65%).

How did this shift happen? Ethnic cleansing certainly helped, but so did economics.

Before the Second World War, [. . .] only half of Vrsac’s population was Serbian while the rest were mainly Germans and Hungarians. Today barely 100 Germans remain. The 1931 census recorded 343,000 Germans in Vojvodina. After the end of the Second World War and the Communist takeover, they were driven out, fled, or died in camps. The new authorities colonised the province with almost a quarter-of-a-million Serbs, mainly from Bosnia, and others from other parts of Yugoslavia. In this way they greatly increased the proportion of Serbs in Vojvodina whilst also creating new minority communities, such as Macedonians and Montenegrins.

These Macedonian and Montenegrin immigrants, it's worth noting, are ethnically similar to the Serbs.

Additionally, while the initial resettlement of formerly German lands in Vojvodina may have been planned colonization, the province was also prosperous enough to attract economic migrants. Throughout the Communist era, Vojvodina's GDP per capita was not much lower than Croatia's and perhaps a fifth higher than that of Serbia proper, placing the province clearly in the rich "north" of the country. GDP per capita crashed over the 1990s, relative to Vojvodina's non-warring neighbours and absolutely thanks to sanctions and economic collapse, relative to Slovenia, never mind absolute GDP per capita, crashed over the 1990s, but Vojvodina still retained its income advantage over the rest of Serbia. This, along with Vojvodina's proximity to Croatia and Bosnia, encouraged the influx of ethnically Serb refugees that help boost Serb numbers even as non-Serb numbers fell.

The wars of the 1990s further accentuated the Serbian presence in Vojvodina. According to Tomislav Zigmanov, director of the Vojvodina Croatian Cultural Institute who lives in Subotica, 35,000 to 40,000 ethnic Croats left or were driven out of Vojvodina in the 1990s. The exact number is hard to pin down because some Vojvodina Croats have in the past declared themselves as Yugoslavs in censuses or as Bunjevci, another minority, close to the Croats.

The 2002 census recorded only 56,546 Croats in Vojvodina, well down on the figure a decade earlier, and that number will certainly be less in the next census in 2011. These people “feel abandoned”, says Zigmanov. Too small and cowed to exert any political influence in Serbia, he says they are looked at askance in Croatia. “It feels like we are punished for living in Serbia,” he says.

Geocurrents noted in a January 2010 blog post that ethnic Serbs now form a solid majority over most of the province, the only real exception apart from some scattered rural enclaves being a pocket of Hugnarians in the north-central region, next to Vojvodina. I suspect that rural enclaves populated by ethnic minorities integrated into a majority-dominated society won't resist assimilation for very long, not that emigration from a region that's now one of the poorest in th Balkans mightn't be attractive for ethnic minorities with options elsewhere.

Like the young people from the other minorities who gravitate towards their “motherland”, young Croats in Vojvodina are also leaving for Croatia. Zigmanov cites several telling statistics. According to a recent poll, he says, 70 per cent of students at Belgrade University said they would not want a Croat as a roommate. It is hardly surprising, then, that an equal percentage of Croatian students from Vojvodina prefer to go to university in Croatia and don’t come back.

Until the end of the First World War, Vojvodina was part of the Kingdom of Hungary and Hungarians are still the province’s largest minority. But their numbers are falling fast also. In 1948 there were 428,932 Hungarians in Vojvodina.

In 1991 that number was down to 340,946 and by 2002 there were only 290,207. In Backa Topola, a depressed northern town with a majority Hungarian population, “anyone who has enough brains runs away”, says Janos Hadzsy, a local journalist. Amongst that number are his own two children who have gone to Hungary.

Fears by Serbian nationalists that Vojvodina will secede are certainly false, if not ridiculous. Vojvodina has never been more Serb by population than it is now, and there's every reason to think that it won't become increasingly Serb. Croats also speak Serbo-Croatian; Romanians, Macedonians, and Montenegrins are also Orthodox Christians; Slovaks and Ruthese are Slavs; Hungarians (and others) don't have to move very far if they want to live in substantially stabler and more prosperous countries. Couple the relative ease of assimilation and dsiproportionately heavy emigration among minorities with fertility rates substantially below replacement levels--Roma constitute the only significant exception, but they're a small minority as yet and marginal besides--and despite Vojvodina's political autonomy the province is going to be increasingly ethnically homogeneous.

I mention the example of Vojvodina partly because it's interesting in its own right--the homogenization of the Yugoslav republics and provinces that began in the post-war era and accelerated during the ethnic cleansings of the 1990s is still ongoing--and partly because it's an example that will become increasingly relevant in other areas in other countries advanced in the demographic transition with their own multicultural traditions. In the Volga-Urals region of Russia, for instance, where any number of Finnic and Turkic minorities co-exist alongside ethnic Russians, living alongside their co-citizens, most often speaking Russian in public life and migrating from their rural heartlands and intermarrying, will many of these ethnic minorities persist? In the main extra-European countries of mass immigration--in places like Argentina and Canada and Australia--will intermarriage and assimilation and migration continue to wear away ethnic diversity on the ground, other groups meeting the fates of the Welsh of Patagonia and the Ukrainians of Saskatchewan and the Germans of South Australia, perhaps more urban groups of newer vintage? Et cetera. There will certainly be new waves of immigrants to all these regions, but with the sorts of factors that operate in Vojvodina, could the fate of the new immigrant-borne cultures possibly be any different?

The world of the fourth demographic transition is likely to be a rather more ethnically and linguistically homogeneous one, methinks.