SNV Bulletin #6 Govor mržnje i nasilje prema Srbima u 2015

SNV Bulletin #6 / 98
/5 Resistance to the Use of Cyrillic Script
A campaign against the Cyrillic script, evident in Croatia since
Zoran Milanović’s government attempted to start implementing
the law on the use of language and script for national minorities,
was effectively legalised on August 17, 2015, when the statute of
the city of Vukovar was formally changed. The changes prevented
the posting of official boards in two languages and alphabets
(Croatian-Serb; Latin-Cyrillic) on state institutions in Vukovar,
although the national law envisages equal use of the minority
language and script in areas where one ethnic minority accounts
for more than 33 percent of the population. This violates the
Constitution of the Republic of Croatia, the Law on language
and script for national minorities and a number of international
conventions.
Two days after the Vukovar Statute was changed, on the night of
August 31, Cyrillic inscriptions on the Erdut Municipality building
at Dalj were sprayed over and Nazi symbols were drawn in
several places. The Serbian Democratic Forum (SDF) reported on
July 3 that a tri-lingual board (Croatian, Serbian, English) written
in Latin and Cyrillic was removed from the front of a building
seating the SDF’s central office at Draškovićeva street in Zagreb.
The same board, carrying the name and logo of the organisation,
was destroyed two more times over the next three months.
Recommendations
The data presented in this Bulletin, compiled by the SNV and the
SDSS caucus in the Croatian parliament, shows that 2015 saw an
escalation in the use of hate speech in the public domain, as well
as an increase in the number of threats and assaults on Serbs in
Croatia. Failure to restrict and punish hate speech, with criminal
offences often qualified as minor misdemeanour, and the condoning
of intolerance by some media further underlined this trend. It
was also evident that politicians and other public figures not only
failed to issue strong and unequivocal condemnations of such
incidents but were increasingly prone to intolerance. The previous
years have shown that legislative changes aiming to punish perpetrators
more severely and ratify various international conventions
to define and prevent such incidents are not enough as long as
they are not consistently implemented in practice.