Anti-Serb sentiment or Serbophobia () refers to negative attitudes, prejudice or discrimination towards Serbs as an ethnic group. Historically, it has been a basis for the persecution, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of ethnic Serbs.
A distinctive form of anti-Serb sentiment is anti-Serbian sentiment, which can be defined as hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Serbia as a nation-state for Serbs. Additionally, another form of anti-Serb sentiment is discrimination or bias against Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Among the most widely-known historical proponents of anti-Serb sentiment was the 19th- and 20th-century Croatian Party of Rights. The most extreme elements of this party later became the Ustaše in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, a Croatian fascist organization that came to power during World War II and instituted racial laws that specifically targeted Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents. Their actions culminated in the genocide of Serbs and other minority groups that lived in that lived in the territory of the then-Independent State of Croatia.
The opposite of Serbophobia is Serbophilia.
History
Before World War I Turks and Albanians in Ottoman Kosovo Vilayet Anti-Serb sentiment in the Kosovo Vilayet grew in the aftermath of the Ottoman-Serb and Ottoman-Greek conflicts during the period between 1877 and 1897. With the Battle of Vranje in 1878, thousands of Ottoman-Albanian troops and Albanian civilians were expelled into the Eastern part of Ottoman-held Kosovo Vilayet. These displaced persons, known as Muhaxir, were highly hostile towards the Serbs in the areas they had retreated to, considering that they had been expelled from the Vranje area due to the Ottoman-Serb conflict. This animosity fuelled anti-Serb sentiment, which resulted in Albanians committing widespread atrocities against Serb civilians, including physical assaults and killings, across the entire territory, including parts of Pristina and Bujanovac.
Atrocities against Serbs in the region eventually peaked in 1901 after the region was flooded with weapons that were not handed back to the Ottomans after the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. In May 1901, Albanians pillaged and partially burned the cities of Novi Pazar, Sjenica, and Pristina, and massacred Serbs in the area of Kolašin. David Little suggests that the actions of Albanians at the time constituted ethnic cleansing as they attempted to create a homogeneous area free of Christian Serbs.
Bulgarians in Ottoman Macedonia The Society Against Serbs was a Bulgarian nationalist organization established in 1897 in Thessaloniki, Ottoman Empire. The organization's activists were both "Centralists" and "Vrhovnists" of the Bulgarian revolutionary committees (the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization and the Supreme Macedonian-Adrianople Committee). By 1902, they had murdered at least 43 people and wounded 52 others, including owners of Serbian schools, teachers, Serbian Orthodox clergy, and other notable Serbs in the Ottoman Empire. Additionally, Bulgarians used the slur word "Serbomans" for people of non-Serbian origin, but with Serbian self-determination in Macedonia.
19th and early 20th century in the Habsburg Croatia
Anti-Serbian sentiment coalesced in 19th-century Croatia when some of the Croatian intelligentsia planned the creation of a Croatian nation-state. Croatia was at the time part of the Habsburg monarchy, while since 1804, it was part of the Austrian Empire, although it remained in personal union with the Kingdom of Hungary. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, it eventually became part of Transleithania, while Dalmatia and Istria remained separate Austrian crown lands. Ante Starčević, the leader of the Party of Rights between 1851 and 1896, believed Croats should confront their neighbors, including Serbs. Among others, he wrote that Serbs were an "unclean race" and, with the co-founder of his party, Eugen Kvaternik, denied the existence of Serbs or Slovenes in Croatia, perceiving their political consciousness as a threat. During the 1850s, Starčević forged the term Slavoserb () to describe people supposedly ready to serve foreign rulers, initially used to refer to some Serbs and his Croat opponent, and later applied to all Serbs by his followers.Tomasevich (2001), p. 3 The Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878 likely contributed to the development of Starčević's anti-Serb sentiment, as he believed that it significantly increased the chances for the establishment of Greater Croatia. David Bruce MacDonald has put forward a thesis that Starčević's theories could only justify ethnocide but not genocide because Starčević intended to assimilate Serbs as "Orthodox Croats", and not to exterminate them.
Starčević's ideas formed the basis for the destructive politics of his successor, Josip Frank, a Croatian Jewish lawyer and politician who converted to Catholicism "Eugen Dido Kvaternik, Sjećanja i zapažanja 1925–1945, Prilozi za hrvatsku povijest.", Dr. Jere Jareb, Starčević, Zagreb, 1995., , str. 267.: Josip Frank pokršten je, kad je imao 18 godina. and led numerous anti-Serbian incidents. Josip Frank carried on Starčević's ideology and defined Croat identity "strictly in terms of Serbophobia." Due to his staunch opposition to any cooperation between Croats and Serbs, Milovan Djilas described him as "a leading anti-Serbian demagogue and the instigator of the persecution of Serbs in Croatia." His followers, referred to as Frankovci, would go on to become the most ardent members of Ustaše. Under Frank's leadership, the Party of Rights became obsessively anti-Serb, and such sentiments dominated Croatian political life in the 1880s. British historian C. A. Macartney stated that due to the "gross intolerance" toward Serbs who lived in Slavonia, they had to seek protection from Count Károly Khuen-Héderváry, the Ban of Croatia-Slavonia, in 1883. During his reign from 1883 to 1903, Hungarian authorities intentionally exacerbated further division and hatred between Serbs and Croats to further their Magyarization policy. Carmichael writes that ethnic division between the Croats and the Serbs at the turn of the 20th century was stoked by a nationalist press and was "incubated entirely in the minds of extremists and fanatics, with little evidence that the areas in which Serbs and Croats had lived for many centuries in close proximity, such as Krajina, were more prone to ethnically inspired violence." In 1902 major anti-Serb riots in Croatia were caused by an article written by Serbian nationalist writer Nikola Stojanović (1880–1964) titled Do istrage vaše ili naše (Till the destruction of you or us) which denied the existence of a Croat nation and forecasted the result of an "inevitable" Serbian-Croatian conflict, that was reprinted in the Serb Independent Party's Srbobran magazine.
Between the mid-19th and early 20th century there were two factions in the Catholic Church in Croatia: the progressive faction which preferred uniting Croatia with Serbia in a progressive Slavic country, and the conservative faction that opposed this. The conservative faction became dominant by the end of the 19th century: The First Croatian Catholic Congress held in Zagreb in 1900 was unreservedly Serbophobic and anti-Orthodox.
World War I
After the Balkan Wars in 1912–1913, anti-Serb sentiment increased in the Austro-Hungarian administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Oskar Potiorek, governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, closed many Serb societies and significantly contributed to the anti-Serb mood before the outbreak of World War I.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg in 1914 led to the Anti-Serb pogrom in Sarajevo. Ivo Andrić refers to this event as the "Sarajevo frenzy of hate." The crowds directed their anger principally at Serb shops, residences of prominent Serbs, the Serbian Orthodox Church, schools, banks, the Serb cultural society Prosvjeta, and the Srpska riječ newspaper offices. Two Serbs were killed that day. That night there were anti-Serb riots in other parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire including Zagreb and Dubrovnik. In the aftermath of the Sarajevo assassination anti-Serb sentiment ran high throughout the Habsburg Empire. Austria-Hungary imprisoned and extradited around 5,500 prominent Serbs, sentenced 460 to death, and established the predominantly Muslim special militia Schutzkorps which carried on the persecution of Serbs.
The Sarajevo assassination became the casus belli for World War I. Taking advantage of an international wave of revulsion against this act of "Serbian nationalist terrorism," Austria-Hungary gave Serbia an ultimatum which led to World War I. Although the Serbs of Austria-Hungary were loyal citizens whose majority participated in its forces during the war, anti-Serb sentiment systematically spread and members of the ethnic group were persecuted all over the country. Austria-Hungary soon occupied the territory of the Kingdom of Serbia, including Kosovo, boosting already intense anti-Serbian sentiment among Albanians whose volunteer units were established to reduce the number of Serbs in Kosovo. A cultural example is the jingle "Alle Serben müssen sterben" ("All Serbs Must Die"), which was popular in Vienna in 1914. (It was also known as "Serbien muß sterbien").
Orders issued on 3 and 13 October 1914 banned the use of Serbian Cyrillic in the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia, limiting it to use in religious instruction. A decree was passed on 3 January 1915, that banned Serbian Cyrillic completely from public use. An imperial order on 25 October 1915, banned the use of Serbian Cyrillic in the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina, except "within the scope of Serb Orthodox Church authorities."Andrej Mitrović, Serbia's Great War, 1914–1918 pp. 78–79. Purdue University Press, 2007. ,
Interwar period
Fascist Italy In the 1920s, Italian fascists accused Serbs of having "atavistic impulses" and they claimed that the Yugoslavs were conspiring together on behalf of "Grand Orient masonry and its funds." One antisemitic claim was that Serbs were part of a "social-democratic, masonic Jewish internationalist plot."Burgwyn, H. James. Italian foreign policy in the interwar period, 1918–1940. p. 43. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997. Benito Mussolini viewed not just the Serbs but the whole "Slavic race" as inferior and barbaric. He identified the Yugoslavs as a threat to Italy and he claimed that the threat rallied Italians together at the end of World War I: "The danger of seeing the Jugo-Slavians settle along the whole Adriatic shore had caused a bringing together in Rome of the cream of our unhappy regions. Students, professors, workmen, citizens—representative men—were entreating the ministers and the professional politicians."Mussolini, Benito; Child, Richard Washburn; Ascoli, Max; & Lamb, Richard (1988) My rise and fall. New York: Da Capo Press. pp. 105–106.
Croats in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia The relations between Croats and Serbs were stressed at the very beginning of the Yugoslav state. Opponents to the Yugoslav unification in the Croatian elite portrayed Serbs negatively, as hegemonists and exploiters, introducing Serbophobia into Croatian society. It was reported that in Lika, there was serious tension between Croats and Serbs. In post-war Osijek, the Šajkača hat was banned by the police but the Austro-Hungarian cap was freely worn, and in the school and judicial system the Orthodox Serbs were termed "Greek-Eastern." There was voluntary segregation in Knin.
A 1993 report of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe stated that Belgrade's centralist policies for the Kingdom of Yugoslavia led to increased anti-Serbian sentiment in Croatia.
World War II Nazi Germany