Not a Fairy Tale But… Fourth Chapter, Second Story: The Surrounded Republic

25 May Not a Fairy Tale But… Fourth Chapter, Second Story: The Surrounded Republic

“The Surronded Republic“
Second Story of the May Monthly Chapter
Written by Aleksandra Panić
Voiceover by Marija Drndić

During the spring of 1992, we heard daily stories about saving men from going to war. A friend of my grandmother’s from Kanjiža called to recount what was happening in a village on the very edge of Vojvodina. As my grandmother relayed it to us, some resourceful Hungarian women had decided to act — to save the men of their town from the looming mobilization. Inside a local pizzeria, they founded their own republic to hide all the men from the village inside, preventing the military police from taking them. She finished the story repeating what she most wanted to believe: that this war wasn’t theirs — the citizens of Vojvodina — let alone the Hungarians’, and that Hungarians from Vojvodina really had no business in the conflicts in Baranja.

I was tickled by the idea of founding a new republic, and in a village no less. In my head, republics were big, drawn on maps, each a different color. I couldn’t even imagine that a republic could fill the space of a pizzeria.

I learned about this event three decades later. What reached me as a little girl — a story passed woman to woman over the phone about rural ingenuity — today stands out as one of the longest and most striking anti-war movements in Vojvodina. Club Zicer[1], and later the Spiritual Republic of Zicer, was an unusual form of anti-war protest in Trešnjevac, a border town in northern Vojvodina.

In the spring of 1992, more than two hundred draft notices arrived in a village of fewer than two thousand inhabitants. This meant that nearly half the village’s eligible men could be sent to the battlefield. A few months prior, citizens of Vojvodina had already been gathering in protests against forced mobilization in Senta, Zrenjanin, and Novi Sad — signing petitions, trying to stop what was already bearing down on the country. Anti-war gatherings became part of everyday life that winter. When an unusually large number of notices arrived in Trešnjevac, the residents called an emergency meeting for the evening of May 10th.

Some sources say the initial idea came from two women at the local health center, while others name seven: Klara Balint, Veronika Gazdag, Eržebet Kanjo, Laura Kavai, Ildiko Bata, Ester Pekla, and Gizela Teslić. To organize the protest, the women turned to Lajoš Bala, the local school director, a man with political and organizational experience.

But the precise number matters less to me than the image I keep returning to. I see women who can no longer sit still, women who feel the state at their door, women whose resistance begins deep in their chests — like a tightening, like a rapid breathing, like the realization that something must be done immediately. They respond to mobilization with another kind of mobilization: a collective refusal to accept the logic by which their sons, husbands, and brothers could simply be picked up and sent to a fratricidal war. A war that is not theirs. My grandmother Ljubica’s words, coming back.

The demands from the May gathering were three: withdraw the mobilization order, demobilize those already at the front, and allow those who had fled abroad to return home unpunished. The state responded to the villagers’ demands with a threat. Trešnjevac was surrounded by armored vehicles, all barrels pointed toward the village. According to Bala, there were exactly 92 vehicles. That image is imprinted in my mind: a small Vojvodina village, the church bell tower in the center, and around it tanks in a formation resembling a noose. They don’t even have to move for the noose to tighten. The mere fact of their presence, sights set on their own citizens, is enough.

Immediately after the protest rally, at Bala’s suggestion, the surrounded men and rally organizers entered the pizzeria and billiard club Zicer, where they established a crisis center. The same evening, they began sending letters and faxes to institutions, the media, politicians, and acquaintances, explaining what they were doing and why. The protest thus shifted visibly, almost accidentally, from the school steps into the interior of the local pizzeria, from the public space of speech into the space of collective imagination. By the next morning, more than two hundred people had spent the night in the pizzeria and its courtyard and would remain there for the next three months.

In my research on Zicer, I came across contradictory data: it’s not entirely clear when or why the army decided to withdraw. MP Šandor Pal states that he and other MPs negotiated with Colonel Mandarić. Bala remembers it differently, more dramatically. There are also those who deny that the village was ever surrounded. But the image stays with me regardless: a small Vojvodina village, the church bell tower in the center, and around it tanks in a formation resembling a noose.

The sources about the military threat may diverge, but not about what followed inside Zicer. Overnight, something like a peace camp takes shape. Locals sleep on blankets and mattresses scattered on the floor. They divide up the work — keeping order, maintaining hygiene, preserving the peace. They cook together, clean, talk, write letters, and statements for the public. In the evenings, literary events, concerts, and talks with politicians — all open to visitors from other towns in Vojvodina. Deserters from Temerin, Ada, Stara Moravica, and Mali Iđoš join them. Artists, journalists, neighbors, supporters. In a space born of necessity, something more than a protest begins to take shape: the rhythm of a different communal life.

Only after life in Zicer was already established, at Bala’s suggestion, was the Spiritual Republic of Zicer proclaimed: a self-declared fiction, belonging to all who lived there, passed through, or simply stayed. A republic that offered shelter where the state had offered only law[2]. A republic that did not mark a territory from which one goes to war, but a place from which war is rejected.

Today I read Zicer through Mbembe’s[3] necropolitics. The state shows its full power precisely where it decides on others’ mortality. Mass mobilization was the mechanism by which living bodies were turned into expendable material for war and for the political ambitions of those in power. The Spiritual Republic of Zicer did not just reject the war; it rejected the state’s right to organize political order through death, establishing an opposing logic: to the bodies threatened with death, it returned the rhythm of everyday life — food, sleep, conversation, culture, communal endurance.

The Spiritual Republic of Zicer lasted ninety-six days. The locals disbanded it on August 20th and returned to their fields, in time for the harvest. Not a single resident of Trešnjevac was forcibly taken across the border. They received nothing from the state except that noose of tanks — a warning and a reminder that to the state, they were a zicer: an easy target.

[1] Zicer is a colloquial Serbian term derived from the German sicher (certain, safe), meaning an easy target or a sure shot — something impossible to miss. The word entered Serbian through Austro-Hungarian influence, particularly in Vojvodina. The closest equivalent in English is the British sporting term sitter: an unmissable shot, a guaranteed score. In both languages, the word sits at the intersection of certainty and vulnerability — the sure thing that, somehow, is also the thing most exposed.

[2] In Serbian, the two words are almost identical: zakon, law, and zaklon, shelter — one letter separating what punishes from what protects.

[3] Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian philosopher and theorist, introduced the concept of necropolitics in his essay of the same name, published in the journal Public Culture in 2003. He later developed the concept in his book Necropolitics, originally published in French in 2016 and translated into English in 2019 (Duke University Press). Necropolitics refers to the use of social and political power to determine who may live and how, and who must die and how (Mbembe, 2019). At the center of Mbembe’s theory is Foucault’s idea of sovereignty: to be sovereign is to exercise control over mortality. Mbembe extends this logic — if biopolitics divides people into those who may live and those who must die, necropolitics transforms that division into an instrument of political order, one that today manifests not necessarily through direct violence, but also through exclusion, neglect, and ecological degradation.