All through the 1990s, a bloody conflict in the Balkans raged just across Hungary's southern borders. Although we read, heard and saw the reports day after day, the documentary film Hungarians in the Yugoslav War by Zoltán Brády and Péter Pál Tóth stirred me deeply. The two filmmakers visited the locations, they sought out eyewitnesses and participants, went through the archives of newsreels and checked amateur videos for material which they then carefully edited. They divided it into sections, wrote notes as an aid to interpretation and to lend emphasis; finally, they added the virtuoso violinist Félix Lajkó's disturbing and passionate music. The chapters have separate titles and a common emblem: the damaged face of a statue of a Hungarian soldier which is part of a First World War memorial. The Hungarian connection with this vicious Yugoslav civil war can be explained by one of its episodes, by no means the bloodiest, namely the armed conflict that broke out between Serbia and Croatia in 1991. The prize in this conflict was precisely an area where a large Hungarian population lives. "Délvidék" or the South Country, as Hungarians still call this region has always been populated by an assortment of peoples: apart from the sizeable Serbian, German, Croatian and Hungarian populations, there were also Slovaks, Ruthenes, Muslims, Jews and Armenians living side by side, sometimes peacefully and sometimes not. By now, the Yugoslav war has sealed the fate of the region: the last multicultural island in Europe will have been replaced by numerous small and ethnically homogeneous nation-states early in the next millennium. The conflicts started years ago, even before Tito's times. The preliminary events included the two World Wars of this century, as a result of which Hungary lost two thirds of her territory and population. Demographic changes did not stop when the guns fell silent: aggravating the losses due to war, were blood feuds and population exchanges combined with out and out genocide. Finally, there was a long period of peace. In Tito's Yugoslavia the main source of tension was halting economic growth and the consequent conflicts between the more prosperous and the economically backward regions. The recipe that started a war was quite simple: increasingly clamorous nationalist propaganda added an ethnic, religious and symbolic twist to these clashes of interest. The Slovene intermezzo was still no more than a demonstration of power; it was in Croatia that things began to turn decidedly nasty, and that is where the film starts. It is worth recording the sequence of events, since the same scenario that was observed in the Croatian war was to be copied in Bosnia and Kosovo, until NATO air power changed all that. In Croatia's Baranya triangle, which marches on Hungary and Serbia, and also in East Slavonia, there were Serbian and Hungarian villages next to the Croatian settlements; people who lived there had traditionally maintained good relations. They took part in each other's festivities; mixed marriages were frequent, and the various ethnic communities worked side by side in the region's factories; they even used the same bars in the nearby towns. All that came to an end: mixed marriages came to be despised, and "foreigners" were put to flight; those who were warned not to turn up ever again because there would be no protection for them could count themselves lucky. Then came the Serb para- military units, calling on the Hungarian houses one after the other, advising or threatening people to move out. These paramilitary units were invariably guided by the inhabitants of neighbouring Serbian villages, former work or boozing mates. Some took heed and left, but the majority stayed on; it was not easy to leave one's homeland and everything that one had put together in a lifetime of hard work. Still more difficult was to believe that a civilized European state would suddenly not be able to guarantee the lives and property of its own citizens. People who lived in fear and in insecurity looked to the Yugoslav People's Army for help: the soldiers would arrive and put things in order, they hoped. "There was no other armed force in the whole of Central Europe that could match the respect and the prestige of the Yugoslav Army", one interviewee recalls. And the soldiers did arrive, with tanks and heavy weapons, but instead of protecting the local civilians, they sided with the local Serbian paramilitary units.

Kórógy is a village that has been in existence for a thousand years, inhabited solely by Calvinist Hungarians. It is no use trying to locate it on the map: squeezed between two Serbian villages, it means something special only to its inhabitants. In the summer of 1991 it was invested and bombarded for three months, with the remnants of the Hungarian population surviving the siege in cellars. All through this time the minister had to be brought in from Kopács to bury the dead. "We knew and heard what was happening over there, but until you actually see it, you don't want to believe it," János Kettős, the minister, said. The final offensive was launched on September 25 with a barrage from guns, mortars and rocket launchers; after this the tanks and the armoured personnel carriers fitted with machine guns rolled in. The soldiers moved from house to house, firing on everything that moved. In the wake of the regular army came the irregulars to finish the job; they killed and raped indiscriminately: men and women, old and young alike fell victim to them. Last came the pillaging: in many cases nothing except the walls were left standing. The paramilitary forces even took door frames and bathroom fittings. The same fate awaited Kopács and Darázs, along with the region's other villages of Croatian and mixed population. The small Hungarian village of Szentlászló fell on November 23, 1991, after a siege of 152 days. "They fired two thousand grenades in a single day, and the seven surviving members of the ‘international brigade' defending the village-consisting of local Hungarians and Croats, Hungarians from the Vojvodina (in Serbia) and Croats returning from Chicago-were forced to withdraw." The words of Eduardo Rózsa-Flores, the unit's Spanish-Hungarian commander. He had arrived on the scene as the correspondent of a Madrid newspaper; after vainly trying to raise public awareness of the danger with his pen; on seeing the indifference and ignorance of international politics and media he swapped it for a gun. When the UN Security Council passed its short-sighted and fatal resolution about the arms embargo in September 1991, they were in effect authorizing the slaughter of Croats and Bosnian Muslims, Eduardo claims. The arms embargo seemed like a rational and fair decision, as it applied to both sides. It was based on the false belief that the hostilities were no more than a local conflict between Croat separatists and Serbs loyal to Yugoslavia. And since the great powers also supported the preservation of the status quo, and thus the maintenance of Yugoslavia, they readily believed the Yugoslav leaders (some of whom have since been declared war criminals) that the Yugoslav army would not intervene in the fighting. In fact, they were sealing the fate of the Croats, whose defence against the former joint army's numerical and technical superiority was a force of hastily recruited volunteers, militia and deserters from the Yugoslav army, virtually unarmed. The results speak for themselves: not until 1997 was Croatia able to restore its territorial integrity and to recover its towns occupied by the Serbs in 1991.

Bosnian Muslims, a Briton born in Botswana, along with Hungarian, Croatian and Serb volunteers from Croatia and Serbia died in the defence of Szentlászló, a small Hungarian village in East Slavonia, just two hours from Budapest by car. One of the people interviewed lost his brother in the fighting. "What kind of a man was your brother?", the reporter asks. "What kind of a man? A young man", comes the answer.

One watches the film in a state of shock. Nor is the agony only derived from the taking stock of the brutalities and suffering. The filmmakers have also interviewed the enemy. They are also Hungarians, from the other side of the river Danube, the border between Croatia and Serbia. Adults and teenagers alike were called up in 1991 for the Yugoslav army. They were ordered to take part in a several-day long exercise, a routine assignment for reservists. Within one or two weeks, or in some cases within twenty-four hours, they found themselves in the front line. The Serbian propaganda machinery, with the media under strict Serbian control, did a good job. The Hungarian soldiers called in from the small villages of the Vojvodina stormed the villages of Baranya in the false belief that armed militiamen and civilians would be lying in ambush, with snipers in every church spire and garret. They only became suspicious on seeing the sign at the village end, and as soon as they began talking to the villagers, instead of shooting at them straight away, their amazement became complete: "So this isn't an Ustasha village then!?"

Those Hungarians in the Vojvodina who were called up in the second stage were not as ill-informed as their brethren; they used every conceivable method to avoid military service: some disappeared when the call-up notice was delivered, some simply failed to report to the draft committee, some moved out of their homes, and those who had the means fled to Hungary or even further away. (Out of a Hungarian population of 350,000 in the Vojvodina, 50,000 have fled since 1991.) People living in small villages or isolated farms could only resort to passive resistance; in the larger towns peace movements were organized (and not just by the Hungarians), with protests and demonstrations. Hungary showed real duplicity in the matter: we admitted all ethnic Hungarians coming from Croatia, but not those from Serbia. Some of them were turned back at the border, others were screened by the authorities, including an entire high-school beavers class sent back over the border by the vigilant authorities at Szeged. It is no different today: ethnic Hungarians from the Vojvodina who fled to Hungary because they did not want to fight in Kosovo, are now held in the crowded camps-because refugee status cannot be given to draft dodgers, an official declared on television the other day. Those ethnic Hungarians who were unable to avoid conscription and were forced to fight in the army saw and experienced the same from the other side. Firing at the villages from a distance was not the worst, one soldier told the reporter; the truly horrible part came when you victoriously marched into the shot-up villages, passing smoking ruins and defiled human bodies, not knowing when you would hear a woman scream-ing in Hungarian or a child crying in the cellar, until they were silenced with a hand grenade. There was talk of soldiers posted to the front without proper training, who caused the death of both their comrades and their own; of soldiers who cleverly sabotaged orders and those who heroically refused orders, for which they were either shot on the spot by the commanding officers or forced into the tank with a pistol at their head; of Hungarians sent into the firing line without arms or ammunition on a reconnaissance mission; of officers' badges that were distributed to privates so as to make them targets for the Croatian snipers; of infantry attacking enemy lines under the influence of drink and drugs; of Hungarian regular units sent into action with Serbian irregulars behind them, with orders to shoot. Soldiers enlisted from the Vojvodina and Slavonia claim independently but in total concert that the barbarity of the paramilitary forces defied belief; they were a law unto themselves and knew no mercy; the dreaded Voivode Seselj, Commander Arkan and the others appeared on the scene round about that time. József Földi, who served three years as a mercenary, claimed that he had seen "nothing like this in Swaziland". There was no end to the horrors that these people had gone through, seen and heard, wherever their ill-fortune had taken them. Perhaps the hardest lot fell on the Hungarians fighting on the Serbian side. They knew that this was not their war, and that truth was not on their side. Unlike the Hungarians in Croatia, they had no hinterland: Hungary failed to stand up for them; in Serbia they became pariahs; the Yugoslav army used them, along with the Bosnian Serbs and the "unreliable" Serbs, mostly from the Vojvodina, as cannon fodder. Many of them became psychologically unstable under the burden; if they did survive, they were sent straight on to Bosnia. Sometimes a father fought on the Croatian front, and a son was sent to Kosovo. The Croatians regarded the hundred days of the fighting for Vukovar as the turning point in the war. The Serbs fired eight hundred thousand shells onto the town, defended by a force of 1,620, who were joined by 900 unarmed volunteers later. Eventually Vukovar, too, fell to the enemy, and was razed to the ground like Kórogy and Szentlászló, but the Serbs lost 11,000 soldiers in the fighting, according to their own report. Of the 1,400 Hungarians from Bácska, only 120 survived, in addition to the twenty men who had escaped to Osijek (Eszék). Hungarian deserters had a choice: they could either go to Hungary or join the "enemy"; by 1992 the Hungarians had their own unit within the Croatian army.

Absurd, funny, touching or painful anecdotes are told about the meeting of Hungarians either on the front or behind the front line; these have the advantage that they usually have a happy ending, or at least a lucky one.

I find nothing strange about the fact that the Hungarians interviewed in the movie seemed to bear no ill feelings towards the Serbs. Perhaps this was due to their discovery that they had been cast in a rotten role in this war. They probably realized that they, by the same token, could have hated themselves or their own kin, since in some case, families were severed by the front line. "This was not a war", the Foreign Legionnaire said and he should know; "here a country's army tried to subjugate its own people and failed, because no army in the world can defeat a people". Whatever it was, it inflicted the same wounds a real war does, it had no victors, and it has still not ended. ß