CROATIAN LADY MINISTER IS RIDING ON

AIM ZAGREB, September 26, 1997

Textbooks in the Serbian language and Cyrillic alphabet for elementary school pupils, primarily in the Danube river valley (Podunavlje), will be published after all. Namely, that was concluded at the recently held meeting of Dr.Jura Radic, Vice-President of the Croatian Government and Ljilja Vokic, Minister of Education and Sports, with representatives of the Serbian national community led by Milos Vojnovic, President of the Joint Communal Council. In addition to publishing of the textbooks, it was also decided to organize the instruction in the Serbian language for all the children who wanted to attend and "if there is one single pupil who wants to follow his instruction in the Croatian language, he will have it", said Radic.

The only thing left for Minister Vokic to do was revise the established appointment of school principals, but according to the demographic criterion. "In those schools in which we expect greater number of Croatian pupils by the end of the year, the principal shall be a Croat, and his deputy a Serb. But if we expect the majority of pupils to be Serbian, then the principal shall be a Serb and his deputy a Croat", explained Radic to journalists. For classes with the majority Serbian students the documentation shall be bilingual while Minister Vokic was left with a task of bringing a decision applicable only to schools in the Podunavlje region on proclaiming a moratorium on the teaching of history from 1989-1997 period, which in other words means that lessons dealing with that period will be stricken from the textbooks. In the end representatives of both the Croatian government and the Serbian community expressed satisfaction with this agreement. Still, it was not reached that easily.

Only a week before this agreement, Minister Vokic gave an interview to "Nedjeljna Dalmacija" entitled "If the Serbs want the Cyrillic Alphabet in Schools, They Should Pay for the Translation of the Textbooks", stating that she would be "ashamed to sign anything just on the basis of the present number of pupils". Namely, this concerned her insistence on the appointment of school principals in accordance with the national population structure from 1991. A big problem was also created with signs on the schools in Podunavlje for which it was agreed to be given "neutral names", in other words, neither Serbian nor Croatian great men, while Vokic was against bilingual signs despite the insistence of the Podunavlje people. Consequently, Serbian representatives did not attend the celebration of the beginning of the school year which made Vokic even angrier. Later on, a compromise was struck - there will be Cyrillic signs, but side by side with those in Latin alphabet.

A hot political autumn in Croatia started with the unofficial information about changes in the Government. It was speculated that the current Minister of Education will join the diplomatic corps, that she has been appointed Ambassador to UNESCO to replace the former Minister Vesna Girardi Jurkic. After this information leaked, many have (prematurely) celebrated Vokic's departure hoping that the position of the national minorities and their education will finally be resolved as it had taken a bad turn from the first day of Vokic's ministerial mandate. It turned out that the news on Vokic's deprature from the ministerial position was false and that first the Italians, and now the Serbs too, will have to carry on the hard struggle which the Minister had been waging under the mask of national revival in pre-school and school education of children in Croatia.

Therefore, the beginning of September was inevitably a period for clarifying Minister's moves. Thus, three officals of the Educational Ministry were summoned by the court because of their statements given to "Novi List" in which they had accused the Minister that with her decisions she violated the rules of the profession, neglecting and supressing them for the sake of politics, for which Vokic sued them. Shortly after that, authors of history textbooks disclosed Minister's blackmail - in case they wanted their textbooks to be accepted they had to change some historical facts. The authors changed them, but the books were rejected. Not even the new version of the Croatian past was to her liking, although one should wonder what kind of authors of history books are these when they agreed to such a blackmail, as if history was a vegetable soup whose ingredients one can change every day.

The start of a new school year reopened the problem of the position of the Italian minority in Croatia and especially its education, on which discussions have been going on for three years now, as of the date Minister Vokic assumed her ministerial position. Numerous recommendations which the Minister has been sending in the direction of Rijeka and Istria, where the majority of Italians in Croatia live, although without any force of law, have to be fulfilled and have in turn resulted in the application of an ethnic filter in the enrollment of children in kindergartens and schools.

Although the Law on Education in the Languages of Ethnic or National Communities or Minorities has somewhat alliveated this situation, but not fully rectified it, the disagreements between the Italian community and the Ministry of Education, or to be more precise Ljilja Vokic, remain a major problem. "The right has been granted for education in one's own language, but not to establish classes with three pupils", said Vokic this summer. The mentioned meeting held several days ago with the Serbs showed that there are those who are more equal than others. The meeting ended with a conclusion that "if there is one single pupil who wants to follow his instruction in the Croatian language, he will have it".

At the meeting between Vokic and the district prefect of Istria, Zufic and the parliamentary representative of the Italian minority, Furio Radin, it was concluded that Istria shall finance classes with a small number of pupils who attend instruction in the Italian language, which means that the Istrians will pay for their schooling twice. In return they received a new order on the reduction of mother tongue lessons - Italian - together with Vokic's reprimands for allegedly opposing the increase of the Croatian language lessons, which only added fuel to the flames.

However, things blew up in Zagreb where the minorities did not present a problem. On the first day of a new school year a strike broke out in the elementary school "S.S.Kranjcevic" when parents and pupils realized that some classes had been disbanded without anyone informing them of that. This was done allegedly because of the insufficient number of pupils in individual classes as the Ministry could not finance such classes. The disputable class IIId in the mentioned school was one of the best in that generation, but the disagreements nevertheless ended with its (and not only its) disappearance and the redistribution of pupils to other classes.

This is not the end of scandals within the Croatian school system. Several days ago papers carried a story about professor Branko Horvatinovic, who is teaching history in the elite XV Mathematical Gymnasium in Zagreb. His activities include making the students enter classrooms marching, teaching them to hate Serbs, visits to Jazovka under the HDZ banner as well as glorification of the Ustashi leader Ante Pavelic. He went so far as to order students to paste his photo in the history textbook among the great men of the Croatian history. The professor proclaimed himself President of the Croatian Home Guard Youth for which he recruited 300 of his students, and on one occasion even tried to take the whole school shift to a mass dedicated to Ante Starcevic. The children filmed all that went on in the school, showed the tape to their parents who, astonished, demanded the Education Ministry to dismiss Horvatinovic. However, although he has been doing this for quite a while, no one has stopped him and he is still regularly carrying on with his plan, under the Ustashi banner and with the Ustashi hails with which he covered his classroom.

In this way the misunderstandings with minorities and falsification of history and open glorification of the Ustashis and Ante Pavelic, are turning the Croatian education in a caricature which has lost all contact with the European values and traditions by which, among other things, the Croatian Minister of Education likes to swear so often. The lack of a basic concept of the Croatian education and a number of scandals which broke out from the first day of Croatian independence have brought about a situation in which all better off parents send their children to be educated abroad, simply fearing for their future which depends on what they learn in early youth. It is only unclear who and for what purposes finds such education and this Minister suitable.

MILIVOJ DjILAS