PLEASE NOTE: This book contains graphic description ... - HUNSOR

1483, more than 200 thousand Serbians were transferred to Hungary. Numerous Serbians foughtagainst the Turks in the Hungarian army.The Turks occupied the central part of Hungary in 1541 and they were chased out in1686 by the United European Forces, under Prince Eugene of Savoy. It was then that a massimmigration of Serbians to Hungary started from Serbia, which was still under Ottoman rule,after the suppressed revolt against the Turks in Kosovo in 1690, the Christian nations on theBalkan peninsula were encouraged by the Austrian Emperor Leopold. Serbian patriarch ArsenijeCarnojevic from Kosovo Polje, sought asylum in Hungary with his people consisting of 36thousand families. At the time, the Serbian newcomers were not considered permanent settlers,only temporary guests.A letter written by Emperor Leopold to the patriarch testifies to this: "We will strive with all ourforce and all our ability to lead the Serbian nation that fled to our country back to their formerland and to expel the enemy from there, with our victorious arms and with the help of God."However, this did not happen. Serbia remained under Turkish rule for a long time. Acentury the Serbs who were granted asylum in Southern Hungary came up in 1790 with a claimof territorial autonomy. In 1848, after the outbreak of the Hungarian War of Independence, theyattacked the Hungarian army in the rear and proclaimed the Southern part of Hungary anindependent Voivodina.They did this in spite of Law 1848,XX. of the Hungarian Parliament which ensured completeecclesiastical and educational13self-government and free use of their native language to the Serbs, something for which aparallel could not easily be found in relation to the rights of any other nationality in Europe atthe time.After the suppression of the Hungarian war of independence by the combined forces ofAustria and Russia, Voivodina was governed directly from Vienna for a short time, but it wasreannexed to Hungary in 1860.At the outbreak of World War I, the Pan-Serbian movement, encouraged and fullysupported by Russia, openly declared that their aim was to destroy the Austro-HungarianMonarchy and to unite all the Southern Slavic nations living on its territory under Serbian rule.All over the world, Southern Slav emigrees started propaganda activities. Together with theCzech emigrees, led by Masaryk and Benes, they undertook the production of an unbridled levelof propaganda rare in modern history. In a memorandum given to the English and Frenchgovernments in May 1915, they referred to Bacska and Banat (also to Croatia and even to thesouth-western part of Hungary) as "Yugoslav national territories" under the name of Vojvodina.They tried to justify this by the false statement: "On this territory, our nation lives in a compactmass and almost without merging with other races". In order to understand the real situation, wemust turn to the data of the 1911 census referring to Bacska, when the Serb population wasrelatively the highest, the proportion of the Hungarian population was 40.5%, the Germanpopulation 29.7%, Serbs and Croats together did not reach 20%.Although theoretically the Trianon Treaty ending the war referred to the lofty Wilsonianprinciple of the "nation's rights to self-determination", what happened in reality was exactly theopposite. Two-thirds of the territory of Hungary was annexed to the neighbouring "victorious"states, along with three and a half million Hungarian inhabitants, who were not asked to whom