The guest speaker was Zlatko Pinter, founder of the Association of Refugee and Displaced Croatians of Vojvodina, a collaborator of the Croatian Homeland War Memorial Documentation Centre, and the author of multiple books. The round table was moderated by Đuro Vidmarović, himself well versed in the issues facing our minority communities abroad.
An online round table discussion was staged at the CHF on 7 May via the Facebook Live internet platform dedicated to the persecution of the Croatians of Vojvodina in the early 1990s.
The guest speaker was Zlatko Pinter. Pinter was born in Zemun on 23 August 1954. He grew up in the village of Plavna in the Bač municipality of the Bačka region in Vojvodina, not far from Vukovar, where he attended elementary school. He received his secondary education in Bačka Palanka. Following his compulsory military service he found employment in Novi Sad, combining work with classes at the School of Economics and Commerce, where he graduated in 1983. After his father’s death in 1981 he moved back to Plavna where he lived through to late August of 1991, when the intimidation of Serbian extremists forced the family to abandon their home and relocate to Croatia, now their permanent home.
Pinter is the founder of the Association of Refugee and Displaced Croatians of Vojvodina, established in Zagreb on 28 December 1991. He joined the nascent Croatian army as a volunteer in the autumn of 1991, taking an active role in the defence of Croatia throughout the war for independence and remaining with the army as an officer through to his retirement in 2007.
Some of the records and documentation Pinter worked to gather was used as evidence when issuing the indictment against Vojislav Šešelj in The Hague in 2002. In recent years he has collaborated with the Croatian Homeland War Memorial Documentation Centre, to which he has presented the bulk of the collected documentation (print materials, documents, eyewitness testimony of the events in Serbia in the 1980s and early 1990s).
Pinter has authored two thematically linked books: Krvavi tragovi velikosrpske ideologije na kraju XX. Stoljeća (“The Bloody Impact of the Greater Serbian Ideology at the Close of the 20th Century”) and Hrvati iz Srijema, Banata i Bačke u vrtlogu devedesetih – Progon i etničko čišćenje 1991. – 1995. (“The Croatians of Srijem, Banat and Bačka in the Turbulent 1990s: Exile and Ethnic Cleansing from 1991 to 1995”). A third volume, Progon i stradanje Hrvata u Vojvodini tijekom Domovinskog rata (prilog kronologiji srbijanskog terora nad Hrvatima u istočnom Srijemu, Banatu i Bačkoj od 1986. do 1995.) (“The Persecution and Suffering of Croatians in Vojvodina During the Homeland War (A Contribution to the Chronology of Serbian Terrorisation of Croatians in Eastern Srijem, Banat and Bačka from 1986 to 1995”) offers a chronology of the terrorisation and expulsion of Croatians from Vojvodina from 1986 to 1995.
The round table was moderated by Đuro Vidmarović, himself well versed in the issues facing our minority communities abroad.
By: Marin Knezović