Voivodina - comparative tranquillity at a Balkan crossroads?

The province of Voivodina in Serbia appears both to have weathered the recent conflicts and escaped the worst excesses of economic crime. Nick Ridley , an intelligence analyst with Europol, who specialises in financial crime in Central and Eastern Europe, offers an overview.

The Voivodina area of Serbia, home to some two million people and part of the current federation of Yugoslavia and Montenegro, is situated in roughly the northernmost third of Serbia. Tito, a Croatian by birth, realised the need to curb pan-Serbian ambitions and so effectively divided Serbia, the largest of the Yugoslav republics, into three, namely Serbia, which was given full republic status, and the semi-autonomous provinces of Kosovo, with its dominant ethnic Albanian population, and Voivodina. In doing so he created a federal power balance between Serbia and Croatian republics of equal size, with Slovenia as the economic hub. However, Tito’s careful strategy did not long survive his death in 1980. One reason for this failure was a heavy flow of economic resources into Kosovo, which merely strengthened Albanian separatism and nationalism. Milosevic cancelled the autonomous status of Kosovo and Voivodina in October 1989 and his vision of a greater Serbia embroiled Kosovo in bloody conflict. By contrast Voivodina remained relatively peaceful.