REVIEW OF DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENT OF SERBS IN NORTH MACEDONIA 1921-2021.

Abstract

In this paper, the author attempts to reconstruct the demographic development of the Serbian people in the territory of the modern Republic of North Macedonia. Serbs today represent a recognized national minority in this country, while in the past they have come a long way from being a dominant ethnic group recognized within the framework of the Ottoman millet system, through to complete non-recognition at the end of Ottoman rule. Then, from the status of a majority people in the interwar period, through extermination in both world wars, to ethnocide in the post-war decades, total non-recognition after the independence of the North Macedonia, to the recognition of the status of a national minority after the signing of the Ohrid Agreement in 2001. In addition to a general overview of the ethnic and religious picture of this area during the Middle Ages and the first centuries of Ottoman rule, special attention will be paid to the last phase of Ottoman rule (1878-1912), marked by serious ethnic engineering, but also to the period after the liberation of this area and its annexation to the Kingdom of Serbia. The central part of the paper will analyze official data from two interwar censuses of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes/Yugoslavia will be analyzed (1921 and 1931), and in a separate section, an analysis of the post-war censuses conducted after the formation of Macedonia as a federal unit within the Second Yugoslavia, i.e. after the separation of the Macedonian nation from the Serbian national fabric, will be performed. In this regard, special interest will be devoted to the census manipulations carried out by the new communist authorities after World War II, which aimed at national engineering in the territory of the newly formed entity. Special attention will be paid to censuses, as well as estimates of the number of Serbs after the independence of the North Macedonia in 1991, including the last census conducted in 2021.