By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Jun 7 2002 (IPS)

By the end of September, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia hopes to become the full member of Council of Europe, ending its decade long isolation from international structures under the regime of former leader Slobodan Milosevic.

However, the idyllic picture of integration into the important international body seems to be blurred by the issue of restitution of property to former factory and landowners who lost it under the communist regime when World War II ended.

Among them are the descendants of 500,000 ethnic Germans who were expelled from Yugoslavia at the time.

“We have not come here to take something away,” said Rudolf Reimann, deputy head of the World Association of Danube Area Germans. “We have come only to seek justice,” he added.

Last month, Reimann chaired the yearly congress of the Association of some 1,5 million ethnic Germans, whose ancestors lived in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania and other countries around the Danube river before World War II.

This was the first session of the Association ever held in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It took place in the town of Subotica, in the northern province of Vojvodina, home of ethnic Germans before World War II.

A census, carried out in 1931, showed that half a million Germans lived in Vojvodina province. They were known as “Volkdeutschers”, settled there in the 17th century, following the Turks withdrawal from southern Hungary.

At the time, the statistics say, ethnic Germans owned 31 percent of land and 46 percent of industry in Vojvodina.

With the German occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941, young Germans were invited to join the “Prinz Eugen” SS division. Some 15,000 belonged to it.

But after the World War II, retaliatory measures of victorious anti-fascist Yugoslav partisans decimated the German population.

The Association says around 80,000 members of the community lost their lives – mainly women, children and the elderly – in the 50 so-called “working camps” in the region. Most of the others were brutally expelled into Austria, Germany or other countries during the 1945-1948 period.

According to the first post World War II census in 1951, only 75,000 Germans lived in the Vojvodina region. Statistics of the 1991 census showed that some 5,000 ethnic Germans remain there.

The issue of ethnic Germans has been taboo for discussion for decades. Not many top officials of the post-World War II period are still alive and those that are claim not to remember anything or else say that the victory over fascists had to have an effect on the remaining Germans. Yugoslavia had more than one million victims under German occupation in the war.

Mirko Tepavac, one of the post WW II communist leaders, said recently: “I visited one of the camps once…It was terrible… I had no special sympathies for Germans then, but from today’s point of view, what was done to them can not be defended now”.

The demand for restitution of ethnic German property was presented to Yugoslav authorities at the end of the Congress last month.

So far, there has been no official response to the request. from the official Belgrade. However sources in the Justice Ministry say that the demand will have to wait until the adoption of the general law on restitution of private property. The deadline for the move is set for October.

“We have no funds to deal with compensation requests for thousands of heirs of people whose property was confiscated after World War II,” an official of Justice Ministry told IPS. “We are studying the experience of other Eastern European countries that had the same problem in the 90s. We hope that we’ll be able to reach some compromise with heirs, ethnic Germans included”.

However, the authorities will have to quicken the pace, as restitution of property seized by the communist authorities is one of the preconditions of Yugoslavia joining the Council of Europe.

Property claimants hope that issue will speed things up. Some Serbs have already said that they intend to take their grievances to the European Court in Strasbourg. A lawsuit of the kind filed against the Romanian government was enough to get it to adopt restitution legislation within days.

“Seeking the justice does not mean we want to create another injustice,” said Rudolf Weiss, head of the German National Alliance in Vojvodina. “Revenge is not our aim”.

Weiss was referring to the fact that after World War II, the confiscated homes of ethnic Germans were allocated to Serbs who fled to Vojvodina from Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro during the war. Three generations of those people lived in Vojvodina and the authorities would have to find alternative accommodation for them.

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