Hrtkovci
Thousands of Serbs fled the Croatian fighting in late 1991, settling in Vojvodina at the Serbian state's request.[51] Hrtkovci, a Croat-majority village located some thirty-five miles west of Belgrade, was slated to accommodate several thousand refugees. Before the influx, some 2,600 of the village's 3,800 residents were ethnic Croats, but tensions soon mounted as the ethnic Serb population grew. Rumors spread that Belgrade officials had told displaced Serbs to evict Croats from their homes. Hrtkovci's Croats were on occasion threatened with beatings and even death if they refused to flee.[52] Children were harassed in school, a few night-time grenades were thrown into Croat gardens, and fistfights erupted in public places. A similar pattern emerged in several other Croat-majority villages. "Croats here were terrified," recalled Father Dejan, an official in Novi Sad's Catholic church. "They kept coming to see me and asking what to do. Within weeks or months after the Serb refugees arrived, the Croat population had begun to flee."[53] The intimidation first began in the villages of Slankamen and Beška, and then moved on to Hrtkovci.
In Belgrade, Vojislav Šešelj was a key supporter of the Vojvodina eviction efforts, arguing in May 1992 that the solution to Serbian refugees' housing problems was "to give them the addresses of the Croats in Serbia, and to give the Croats the addresses of abandoned Serb houses in Croatia. Then a population exchange will take place, even if under pressure."[54] Such plans were blatantly illegal, of course, and officials from Serbia's ruling Socialist Party condemned them harshly.[55] Still, there were
Unofficially, some Serbian officials appeared to tacitly support Šešelj's eviction campaign. Father Dejan thought that national security considerations were paramount; Serbian state security, in particular, he said, feared that Vojvodina's Croats would become a fifth column.[56] Stanimir, a senior member of Vojvodina's anti-nationalist party, the League of Vojvodina Social Democrats, believed the evictions sought to change the province's electoral balance of power. "It was straight electoral politics," Stanimir claimed. "Milošević wanted to get rid of anybody whom he couldn't trust to vote for him."[57]
Tensions crested in Hrtkovci after a large, Šešelj-led rally in the village on May 6, 1992, when nationalist spokesmen demanded in no uncertain terms that local Croats pick up and leave. Thousands of Serbian Radical Party supporters, including many recent Serbian refugee arrivals, attended, according to Father Dejan, and many "marched in full četnik uniform."[58] One speaker went so far as to read out the names of alleged Croat traitors, warning them to flee Hrtkovci as soon as possible.