The Serbian Demographic Crisis

by Wolfson

A couple of weeks ago there was a stir in the Serbian media as a UN World Population Prospect report was released. Today there are 8.851.000 people inhabiting Serbia. In 2030 there will be 8.218.000, in 2050 there will be 7.331.000 and finally in 2100 there will be a measly 5.334.000 people living there.

These numbers include Kosovo and Metohija which is now predominantly Albanian, meaning they are skewed seeing as the Albanians reproduce at a higher rate than the Serbs. A report published in 2012 by the Republican Institute of Statistics of Serbia paints a much more grim and realistic picture.

“The Serbian population is 2 years older than it was a decade ago. There are more women than men and most citizens are aged 58”

“This year’s census has shown that there are 7.186.862 people living in Serbia, 51.3% are women. Last year, not a single child was born in 1500 settlements and the total population number has dropped by 4%”

“The average age of the Serbian population in 42.2”

“Some 1000 settlements, i.e. one in five, have less than 100 people”

Three main events, have contributed to such a situation. WW1, WW2 and the NATO aggression of 1999.

World War One

World War One, while being one of the brightest moments in Serbian history from a moral aspect was a complete disaster demographically. While there is no consensus on the number of victims of The Great War, the numbers given by the Delegation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 are widely accepted.

The total military losses of the Serbian army were 402.435 dead during the period July 1914 – November 1918. The civilian casualties were even higher. That means that since the number of mobilized troops was 712.005, Serbia lost more than half of the men it mobilized.

The numbers are even worse where the civilian population is concerned.3

“Civilians were victims of bombings, occupiers’ crimes (mass executions), infectious diseases, lack of medicine, deportation and difficult conditions in concentration camps, forced mobilizations, hunger, etc. For example, it is noted that in 1917 Bulgarian occupiers massacred 20,000 civilians in Toplica district alone; that during three years of occupation of Serbia, approximately 182,000 persons were interned or deported to Bulgaria, Austro-Hungary, or Germany, and that of these, 80,000 died during transportation or were killed in concentration camps. Especially large losses were caused by the epidemic typhus which in 1915 alone killed 350,000 civilians.”

A total of 845.000 civilians lost their lives during this period. Before the war the number of people living in Serbia was 4.500.000 while after the war that number had dropped to 3.300.000, a decrease of 1.200.000. If we take into account the fact that Serbia would have numbered 5.200.000 in 1919 had there been no war, the number of casualties is 1.900.000. A devastating blow to such a small country. The number of men lost meant that entire villages were completely devoid of male inhabitants, further decreasing the reproductive capabilities of the small Balkan nation.

World War Two

As is the case with WW1, the number of Serbs killed during WW2 is not agreed upon exactly. But it is enough to look at just one place of death and suffering to understand the magnitude of the losses sustained by the Serbian people during World War 2, and that is the Jasenovac concentration camp. The largest concentration camp in the Independent State of Croatia and the third largest in Nazi occupied Europe.

The Yad Vashem Center states that more than 500.000 Serbs were murdered in Croatia, in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust one can find that some 600.000 people were murdered at Jasenovac, mostly Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and opponents of the Ustashe regime. The number of Jewish victims was between twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand, most of whom were murdered there up to August 1942, when deportation of the Croatian Jews to Auschwitz for extermination began.

Another source is the memoir of Dr. Hermann Neubacher who noted in it that the Ustasha themselves boasted of killing a million Serbs altogether, although he thought 750,000 was a more likely number. Granted, not all were killed in Jasenovac.

And this was just one concentration camp. When one considers the ethnic cleansing committed in occupied Serbia by the Germans, the ethnic cleansing committed (with the blessing of Mussolini’s Italy) by the Albanians in Kosovo and the communist purges after the Partisans came to power, an understanding of the scale of death and destruction emerges.

The NATO Aggression

Compared to the previous two events, the NATO aggression that took place in 1999 was nowhere near as bad with regards to the number of dead. While over 2000 civilians lost their lives, 88 of them being children, the real blow to Serbia was dealt by destroying its economy and infrastructure, poisoning the environment and installing pro-Western lackeys into office.

Destroying its economy and infrastructure sent Serbia back to the third world. It is estimated that the damage done by NATO exceeds 100 billion USD. NATO’s humanitarianism did not stop there. Nearly 10 tons of depleted uranium were dropped on the small Balkan country causing a drastic increase in cancer rates.

Even after all this it looked as if Serbia might be able to recover, but then came October 5th and the Western backed ouster of Slobodan Milosevic. What came after is what we see in the Ukraine today. Politicians grabbing as much as they can for themselves, a decreasing living standard and an extremely high unemployment rate.

This kind of situation contributes to population loss in two ways. Firstly, people just stop having children or limit themselves to one offspring since they cannot afford to have any more. Having children has become a luxury. Secondly, the infamous brain drain, which is responsible for 32.000 people leaving Serbia every year.

The situation is dire. The regime in power in Serbia today has turned the country into a banana republic. The interests of Washington and Brussels are the only interests of the ruling “elite”, and since a strong and prosperous Serbia is viewed as a threat by these centers of power, it is unreasonable to expect the puppets to do anything.

Something must be done. The economy must be resurrected and the Serbian people given a sense of purpose. The battle is far from lost. There is a Serbian diaspora numbering in the millions that could be persuaded to return (or at the very least financially help) under the right conditions. Persuaded to return to a country of which 60% is farmable, which has an abundance of drinking water and which is rich with natural resources. A country which could become an example of social and economic welfare.

But that something must be done now. The option of waiting for things to happen by themselves is off the table since within a decade the Serbian people will no longer be able to demographically recover.

That means that if something is not done within the next decade, the people who gave the world scientists like Nikola Tesla, athletes like Novak Djokovic and revolutionaries like Petar Karadjordje might not be around in two centuries’ time.