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

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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.
Hate Speech and Violence Against Serbs in 2015 / 99 Responsibility lies mostly with the institutions in charge of enforcing laws, in this case the ministry of interior (MUP), the State prosecutors (DORH) and other judiciary bodies. Keeping more systematic statistics about such incidents would certainly help improve the situation. As it is, DORH (state prosecutors) does not have detailed information about hate crimes so that, for example, it is impossible to determine the number of charges that have been filed, investigations that have been approved or indictments raised for the crime of public denial or belittlement of genocide, the crime of aggression, crimes against humanity or war crimes. Likewise, MUP (the Interior Ministry) should in the coming period work on amending the outdated civil law so that hate speech is treated exclusively as a criminal offence. A change in media legislation would also help reduce the amount of hate speech in the public domain, following the example of Slovenia, whose law is more rigorous and envisages steep fines for the media that do not remove insulting comments. Police, or rather the Interior ministry, still allows the organisation of rallies where genocide and the Holocaust are denied, visitors are insulted, proscribed symbols are displayed and Ustasha slogans shouted. It is worrying that in most cases of criminal offences or misdemeanour the police still fail to find the perpetrators. Such behaviour by the police sends a worrying message to the citizens that the state does not guarantee them safety and a peaceful life. Two separate research projects conducted last year also highlighted the dangerous trend of radicalisation. MyPlace 34 , a research conducted in 14 European countries, showed that youngsters in Croatia have proved to have particular tolerance for the use of violence, while in a survey about literacy in graduation-level secondary school students in Croatia 35 as many as 23 percent of the youngsters did not consider the NDH a fascist state. The survey was carried out by the Institut za društvena istraživanja (Institute for Social Research), GONG and GOOD inicijativa. All of this shows that it is necessary to introduce into the school curricula the subject of civic education, whose essential part is education about human rights. 34 http://www.fp7-myplace. eu/deliverables.php 35 http://goo.hr/wpcontent/uploads/2015/09/ ISTRA%C5%BDIVANJE- POLITI%C4%8CKE- PISMENOSTI- U%C4%8CENIKA- ZAVR%C5%A0NIH- RAZREDA-SREDNJIH- %C5%A0KOLA.pdf
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SNV Bulletin #6 Govor mržnje i nasilje prema Srbima u 2015

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