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Reasons for publishing
THE SUPPLEMENT TO TEXTBOOKS OF CURRENT CROATIAN HISTORY
The editorial board of Documenta — Center for dealing with the past
The Supplement to Textbooks of Current Croatian History is a handbook for history lectures, which was ordered by
the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education, and Sports after the five-year moratorium on teaching current history
in the Podunavlje region expired in the 2002/2003 school year. This easternmost region of Croatia remained under
the control of local Serbs after the end of the 1991-1995 conflict, and was returned to Croatian sovereignty in 1998
after a transitory period under UN administration and the signing of an agreement between the Croatian government
and the local Serb population. Part of the agreement included the decision that instruction in Podunavlje
for Croat and Serb children would take place in separate classrooms, and that a five-year moratorium on teaching
contemporary Croatian history in classes taught in the Serbian language would be imposed.
At the end of 2002, the Ministry, headed by Minister Vladimir Strugar, in cooperation with the representatives
of the Serb community and several history teachers, decided to form the „Commission for developing proposals
regarding the teaching of history of the former Yugoslavia since 1989 in the schools of the Croatian Podunavlje,“
as well as produce a handbook which would cover the period of contemporary Croatian history after 1989. It was
concluded that the handbook needed to function as an appendix for existing textbooks, and that it would serve
as the first step in eliminating the moratorium and as a temporary solution until new textbooks could be chosen
that would be translated into the Serbian language and script.
After failing to find a publishing company to produce the handbook during 2003, work continued in the fall of 2004,
under Minister Dragan Primorac. The Commission chose Tvrtko Jakovina and Snježana Koren from the Department
of History at the Philosophy Faculty, University of Zagreb, as well as Magdalena Najbar-Agičić, the author and
editor of a number of elementary and high school history textbooks, to complete the handbook.
The authors finished the handbook in April 2005. In the meantime, the Commission decided that the text would
not only serve the students in Podunavlje, but other students across all of Croatia as additional material for
studying contemporary history. Once the work was completed, the manuscript was given to reviewers who needed
to evaluate the quality of the methodology as well as the historical content of the material. However, before the
reviews — some of which were subsequently shown to be very positive while others were extremely negative —
reached the authors of the handbook, the content of the negative reviews appeared in the media and sparked
a public debate that lasted for several months. The actual text of the Supplement remained, for the most part,
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