MANJINE I MEDIJI NA ZAPADNOM BALKANU - RRPP

Yugoslavia’s disintegration, found themselves under the authority of the newly-established
countries, while their “home country” was one of the former republics 15 .
Although recognition of status and definition of minorities differs from country to country,
common for all four monitored countries in this project is that this field suffers all
consequences of the insufficiently regulated inter-ethnic relations arising with the country’s
dissolution, the growing nationalisms of the majority nations that claim right to their national
states and the wars.
The case of Bosnia-Herzegovina is characteristic. The Dayton Constitution defined all
constituent peoples – Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats – as sovereign, placing all others who do not
declare themselves as members of the constituent peoples in the category of “others”. The
bureaucratic term “others” has produced a lot of misunderstanding and become the cause of
one of the most blatant violations of human rights – that members of national minorities
cannot run for or be elected to the state Presidency and BiH Parliament House of Peoples,
over which BiH was handed a guilty verdict by the European Court of Human Rights in
Strasbourg and obligated to change its Constitution in this regard. Laws on protection of
rights of national minorities (one state law and two entity laws) list 17 national minorities in
BiH. They are, thus, part of the category of “others”, which also includes Bosnians, who are
called a political minority by many, because these are usually people who place identification
with the state before their ethnic background when declaring themselves or people from
mixed marriages who find a compromise this way in the harsh ethnic divisions (a similar
situation as with Yugoslavs in the former Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, who
were not carriers of ethnic sovereignty either).
Serbia is defined by the Constitution as a state of the Serbian people and all citizens living in
it. The rights of national minorities in Serbia are guaranteed by seven articles of the
Constitution, the Law on National Councils and the Law on the Protection of Rights and
Freedoms of Minorities. Twenty-six national minorities live in Serbia and they have created
their national councils from which they derive all of their rights. Serbia, which due to its
multiethnic population structure, particularly in Vojvodina, inherits to large extent the manner
in which relations with minorities were regulated in the former country, is now being
criticized that the state’s concern with protection of minority rights differs between so-called
Serbia proper and Vojvodina. This is reflected in an unsatisfactory position of minorities
(which mostly reside in this part of Serbia) in Belgrade media.
Montenegro is defined by the Constitution as a secular state and carriers of sovereignty are
citizens who have Montenegrin citizenship. The Preamble to the Constitution of Montenegro
identifies ethnic groups as “peoples and national minorities”, but without reference as to
which group is a people and which is a national minority. The rights of national minorities in
Montenegro are guaranteed by the Law on Minority Rights and Freedoms. As minority
peoples, a minority national community is “every group of citizens of Montenegro, smaller in
number than the rest of the predominant population, which has common ethnic, religious or
lingual characteristics differing from the rest of the population…” Researchers on this project
draw attention to vagueness in the definition and establishment of minority status, which
causes some confusion in Montenegrin society and impacts the exercise of various minority
rights. This is particularly true with regard to Serbians, who make up nearly 30 percent and
15 REGIONALNI GLASNIK ZA PROMOCIJU KULTURE MANJINSKIH PRAVA I MEĐUETNIČKE
TOLERANCIJE (2004), Dušan Janjić – “Nove manjine u traganju za identitetom i statusom“, Stina, Media Plan
Institute and Novi Sad Journalism School; http://www.mediaplan.ba/servis/servis03_ba.pdf
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