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Attacks on Cultural and Religious Buildings

Since early 2004, there have been a series of attacks on cultural and religious buildings in Vojvodina belonging to ethnic Hungarians, Croats, Slovaks, and Ruthenians. The attacks have followed a pattern, with unknown perpetrators smashing windows. In some cases, the police failed to identify the perpetrators.⁹⁵ It is unclear to what extent the failure arose from insufficient political will to investigate the cases, as opposed to inherent difficulties in discovering the perpetrators of such offenses. A more appropriate test of the government response to the violence is the response of the police – and judiciary – in those cases in which the police identified the perpetrators.

In only one case where the perpetrator was identified did the competent public prosecutor (in Novi Sad) initiate proceedings for incitement to ethnic and religious hatred. The case involved a minor who painted Nazi swastikas on the façade of the Catholic parish house in Petrovaradin, a suburb of Novi Sad, on November 23, 2004.⁹⁶  Because of the perpetrator’s age, he was dealt with using the proceedings for cases involving minors, rather than the regular criminal courts.⁹⁷ In another case, the authorities prosecuted solely on lesser criminal charges, although there was strong evidence of incitement to ethnic violence.

Backa Palanka, March 28, 2004: Three Religious Shrines and Slovak Cultural and Publishing Society  

On the night of March 27 or in the early hours of March 28, 2004, a group of six drunken Serb youths vandalized a number of premises in town Backa Palanka, including those belonging to Slovak and Protestant communities. The offenders initially damaged a window at the office of the ultra-nationalistic Serb Radical Party and a window in a store across the street. Then, a few hundred meters down the street, they broke windows of the Slovak Evangelistic Church and windows on the nearby building of the Slovak Cultural and Publishing Society (Matica Slovacka). Two offenders (Milos Koncar and Mladen Danilov) went to a side street and broke the window of another trade center. They then re-joined the main group, which headed toward the town center. Along the way, they left numerous stores, kiosks, and restaurants untouched, but broke windows of two more places of worship: the “Shalon” church and the Adventist church.⁹⁸ Finally, Koncar and Danilov put a used car tire on a traffic light, obscuring the signals.⁹⁹    

The municipal authorities promptly condemned the incident.¹⁰⁰ The head of the Slovak Cultural Center praised the police, who showed up at the site within twenty or thirty minutes.¹⁰¹ The police identified and arrested the six perpetrators within a day.¹⁰² One perpetrator was twenty-five-years old, two were twenty-one-years old, two just turned eighteen, and one was still a minor.¹⁰³  

Five days after the event, the municipal public prosecutor in Backa Palanka issued an indictment against those over eighteen, charging them with “damaging someone else’s belongings” (article 176 of the Serbian penal code). Koncar and Danilov were also charged with jeopardizing traffic (article 197). At the trial, the defendants admitted to the crimes with which they were charged. On April 16, 2004, Backa Palanka Municipal Court entered findings of guilt against all five. The penalties included suspended prison sentences ranging from six months to one year, not to be served if the convicts refrain from committing criminal acts in the following three years. The court explained the relatively light sentences by citing the defendants’ youth, their remorse, and the absence of prior criminal records.¹⁰⁴

Given the diversity of targets during the rampage, even the representatives of the Slovak community in Backa Palanka are hesitant to qualify the incident as anything more than ordinary vandalism by drunken youth.¹⁰⁵ The prosecutor used the same rationale in devising the indictment, and the presiding judge agreed in deciding the verdict.¹⁰⁶ 

It appears, however, that in charging and sentencing the defendants, both the prosecutor and the judge failed to pursue the possibility that initially random property destruction turned into violence aimed at inciting ethnic and religious hatred. While the assailants initially damaged all public objects they found along the way, after reaching the Slovak church and cultural center they turned their destructive efforts mainly on religious shrines and Slovak institutions.  The prosecutor failed to pursue the possibility that the intent of the perpetrators included a desire to provoke hatred against certain religious and ethnic groups, or at least that they were reckless as to whether hatred would result from their actions.¹⁰⁷

It is also likely that different participants acted with different forms of intent. It follows from the court’s judgment that Milos Koncar and Mladen Danilov used violence indiscriminately, while Vukasin Perisic and Petar Ivic targeted only religious and cultural institutions.¹⁰⁸ Perisic is alleged to have paraded through the town in the past wearing a subara, a fur cap worn by Serb extremists during the World War II and in the wars in the former Yugoslavia in 1990s.¹⁰⁹ Ivic had allegedly commented that the United Pentecostal Church in Backa Palanka should be set on fire.¹¹⁰ 

The case provides an example of the failure of the judiciary to consider whether offenses have an ethnic or religious dimension even where there is evidence to support such a conclusion. The fact that the offenders’ intent may have differed, or been mixed, is an insufficient explanation for the failure to properly consider the ethnic or religious dimension of the offenses.