Sad, amid concern about a "Satanist cult" in the region, BosNewsLife monitored Thursday, October 2.
The two suspects, a boy and a girl from the local school, destroyed some 80 headstones in the cemetery early Sunday, September 28, under influence of "a large quantity of alcohol," the Beta news agency quoted Novi Sad police chief Bosko Arsenijevic as saying.
While he ruled out any "political or religious motives", police officials and leaders of the estimated 300,000 ethnic Hungarians in Serbia’s Vojvodina province blamed the attack on a "Satanist cult".
But Arsenijevic said the children, who he described as "excellent students," had confessed to the crime and claimed they had no idea why they had done it, Beta reported. The judge and the welfare centre would decide on their punishment, he added.
TOMBSTONES
The President of the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians (AVH) a party representing ethnic Hungarians, said "Satanists" shattered tombstones, broke crosses or pulled them out and stuck them upside down.
"Despite the fact that Satanists do not make ethnic differences, this awful act of vandalism was focussed on the graves of deceased Hungarians," the official, Jozef Kasa, told the Hungarian News Agency MTI.
Government officials suggested the latest violence showed a deeper spiritual problem in Serbia, following a decade of Balkan wars which saw Europe’s worst atrocities since World War Two.
"The violence and intolerance are signs of lack of any faith or morals, regardless of the perpetrators’ religious affiliation, " said the Serbian Ministry of Religion in a statement seen by BosNewsLife.
TOLERANCE
"The tolerance rests on the efforts of each individual, but of society as a whole as well," the Ministry stressed.
Beta quoted the chairman of the Novi Sad assembly, Nenad Canak, as saying the attacks was the work of "the direct descendants of those who had buried people in mass graves without headstones."
Human rights watchdogs, including Forum 18, have also reported similar attacks elsewhere in Serbia and the Serbian province of Kosovo as well as violence against church leaders and individual believers.
Psychologists have expressed concern about what they see as a general increase in violent acts among those disillusioned in a region ravaged by war and ethnic strife. On Thursday, October 2, a memorial service was held for four intelligence officers killed by a colleague at their headquarters in the Serbian town of Nis two days earlier.
VIETNAM
Radoje Novicevic, Momcilo Momcilovic, Tomislav Dragovic and Ana Radulovic died when Vladimir Rovcanin burst into the Security-Information Agency, BIA, and opened fire from an automatic weapon, reports said.
Rovcanin, who had spent time working in Kosovo, later reportedly told investigators he had been under "psychological pressure", which Serbian police blamed on what is known as the "Vietnam Syndrom."
Evangelical Christians in Serbia, supported by foreign organizations and churches, have made clear they want to continue to spread the Gospel and love of Christ to the volatile region.
