Eastern Serbia Dies Slow Death from Depopulation
25 07 2007 Low birth rate, migration and lack of state support for families is condemning rural communities to extinction.
By Silvija Vukasinovic in MajdanpekA baby hasn’t been born in the picturesque village of Miroc for more than two years.
“The last new-born child was a girl and we believed it was a good omen for a prosperous year that would bring us more babies,” says Svetlana Jovanovic, of the Miroc local assembly. “But little Natasa remains the only one.”
Jovanovic fondly remembers the years when Natasa would have started life in the village as one of about 20 toddlers. But that was long ago. The latest census shows that eastern Serbia’s Timok region, which adjoins Romania and Bulgaria, has lost a population over the last decade that is equal in size to one of its major towns, Bor.
In the past 12 years, the region’s population has decreased by about 30,000 and every year at least one settlement gives up the ghost entirely in this large and thinly populated area.
“The Timok region faces a grave depopulation problem,” Milan Jelenkovic, head of the Zajecar statistics office, said. “In 2005, the mortality rate outweighed the birth rate by 1,191 persons in the Bor basin and by 1,686 people in the Zajecar municipality alone,” he added.
Zajecar now has fewer inhabitants than it had more than half a century ago after the end of the Second World War – a decline attributed to a low birth rate and the migration of families either to Belgrade or abroad.
Schools have been hit hard by “the white plague” - the bela kuga,” as Jelenkovic calls it. He added that when the new school year starts this autumn, there will be no first-graders in Miroc or in the nearby villages of Strbac and Kopana Glavica. The three villages muster a total of only five pupils in four grades.
“Back in the old days, the school in Kopana Glavica had 50 pupils. There were fewer when my children grew up but still many. Now, it’s just a sad sight,” says Leposava Minic, aged 55.
Minic’s own grandson, Marko, is not starting school in September in the village school, either. He is beginning his studies in Vienna. “We went to Austria temporarily to work but we really live there now,” she adds.
Thousands of people from the Timok region took the same road, abandoning the rural backwater of eastern Serbia in order to make a better life abroad.
The owners of the attractive but empty house next door to the Minics left during the turbulent and economically devastating 1990s, she went on. The old folks come back for the holidays but their children and grandchildren do not even do that; they find the French Riviera and Costa Brava and Costa del Sol in Spain more enticing. Some local people have bought houses there.
Economic hardship is seen as the key to the region’s steady depopulation and decline. According to the Zajecar Chamber of Commerce, industrial production in the region grew by a mere 1.5 per cent last year, significantly less than in other parts of Serbia.
Serbia’s official estimates of the average fertility rate in 2006 were set at 1.69 babies per woman.
Unemployment has in consequence remained a blight. The town of Majdanpek has only 6,805 registered working age adults today. Fifteen years ago, it had twice as many.
The town’s key employer gold smelter and jewelry produces Zlatara Majdanpek has collapsed with its mother company, the Copper Mininin and Smelting Complex Bor (RTB Bor).
At the same time, the remaining adult population in the east of Serbia is ageing fast. Overall, Serbia still seems not to have woken up to the alarming fact it has become an aging population with the median age of 37.3, and life expectancy of 75.06 years.
The most recent 2001 census, has confirmed that eastern Serbia’s population is declining across the board. Many of the smallest communities are hurtling towards imminent extinction.
Villages of 500 have decreased by an average of 90 per cent, those of 1,000 by 80 per cent while towns of up to 5,000 have been halved.
The communist Yugoslav federation had measures to stimulate the economy in areas like the Timok region. Public sector workers were offered better wages than their Belgrade counterparts and people were given apartments and other benefits to encourage them to stay there - and away from the capital.
Serbia has no such tools today and young people are flocking to the big cities where it is easier to find a job and earn another income on the side. Sending children to school and obtaining medical care have also become more expensive for families living in rural areas owing to the ramshackle infrastructure and poor facilities.
The primary school network today is more suitable to families living in towns and cities. Declining rural populations mean many village schools have amalgamated or closed. No one wants to leave six-year olds walking miles to the nearest school alone and unaccompanied by parents who are busy earning salaries somewhere. To many families, moving to the city is the best alternative.
In many remaining village schools, facilities are poor. “I can’t imagine how we will organise a foreign language class in a school of five students,” says Ljubisa Bozinovic, headmaster of the Vuk Karadzic elementary school in Donji Milanovac.
These children are deprived of quality education and it is only when they join secondary schools in urban areas that they realise how far behind they are in terms of knowledge, he said.
Demographic experts have called on the government to look further at measures that may make life easier for young families, especially in rural areas.
But so far there has been little action. The government has not, for example, lifted VAT on sales of baby and infant products, even though they remain relatively expensive.
Zoran Gavrilovic, 36, a handyman from Krapacos village near Donji Milanovac, feels he is doing his bit for the Serbian countryside, having fathered eight children aged 18 months to 13 with his wife of 14 years.
But Gavrilovic says the authorities do little to help large families like his. “Monthly we get about 6,000 dinars [80 euros] from the state as child support,” he said.
Families with nine-children in the old socialist Yugoslavia could hope for President Josip Tito to become their ninth child’s godfather. The Gavrilovics cannot count on such support if they have another hungry mouth to feed.
The mayor of Majdanpek, Dragan Popovic, says his municipality is now offering financial bonuses for families, after he persuaded the local assembly to divert resources from the slim annual budget to child support funds.
But the initiative has been almost fruitless so far. A mere 42 babies were born this year in Majdanpek’s two urban and 12 rural municipalities. The figure used to be 300 babies a year only 20 or even ten years ago.
Eastern Serbia’s towns and villages are now eerily quiet. Squares and lanes bustling with children are a rare sight. Weddings are few and far between and when they happen they are often between a couple that has gone - or is going - to live abroad. There are many households of one.
The inhabitants of Miroc have not forgotten the telling death of 70-year-old Petar Radivojevic a few years back. After he froze to death one winter while returning home from a nearby field, there were no young people around to dig the grave. It took the entire village’s ageing population to bury him in the bitter cold and heavy snow.
Silvija Vukasinovic is a reporter for Majdanpek radio and television. Balkan Insight is BIRN`s online publication.
This article was published with the support of the British embassy in Belgrade and National Endowment for Democracy - NED, as part of BIRN's Minority Media Training and Reporting Project.
http://www.birn.eu.com/en/95/10/3719/
