Croatian Politicians ‘Fuelling Hatred of Serbs’

Tamara Opacic, the author of a new survey of violence and intolerance against Croatia’s Serb minority last year, blamed politicians for using ethnic intolerance to attract votes.

Sven Milekic

BIRN

Zagreb

Tamara Opacic.

Journalist and researcher Tamara Opacic, the author of ‘Violence and Intolerance Against Serbs in 2014’, which was recently published by the Serbian National Council in Zagreb, told BIRN that the Serbian minority in Croatia experienced up to 40 per cent more violence and intolerance in 2014 than in the previous year.
She said that intolerance spread after a campaign group led by war veterans called the Headquarters for the Defence of Croatian Vukovar started protesting against the introduction of bilingual signs in Croatian Latin and Serbian Cyrillic on official buildings in the wartime flashpoint town of Vukovar.
Croatian police clashed with veterans from Vukovar on numerous occasions in 2013 over the bilingual signs in the town which in 1991sustained massive shelling while besieged by the Yugoslav People’s Armyand Serb paramilitaries.
“We realised that with the placing of the first bilingual Latin-Cyrillic plates in Vukovar and the protest by the Headquarters for the Defence of Croatian Vukovar, discrimination and intolerance towards Serbs spread throughout the whole of Croatia,” Opacic said.
Opacic, a 29-year-old from the coastal town of Zadar, has had a special interest in human rights and activism for several years. She has worked for the alternative news and politics website H-alter and is now executive editor for news portal Novosti, published by Serbian National Council, which represents the interests of Croatia’s Serbs.
She said that a large part of her data came from anonymous complaints received by the legal department at the Serbian National Council. The rest was collected from Croatian media, from the weekly magazine version of Novosti.
“After we noticed an increased amount of graffiti of Nazi, fascist and Ustasa [Croatian WWII Nazi-aligned troops] symbols and hate speech in general around Croatia, our correspondents from across Croatia started to report about it and took photos,” she explained.

Cyrillic signs attacked in Vukovar. Photo: Beta

“Before the signs were installed [in Vukovar], these things were mostly recorded in rural areas where the most of the Serbs returned after the war. After 2013, such a level of discrimination started to appear in urban areas, although in rural areas, physical and verbal attacks are more common,” she stated.
The incidents in her survey include an attack on an 80-year-old Serb woman near the town of Nasice in eastern Croatia and two attacks on school pupils in Zagreb.
Opacic noted that in 2014, Croatian police recorded 44 ethnically-motivated misdemeanours in ‘areas of special state concern’ - economically underdeveloped regions -of which 32 were committed against Serbs.
“From recorded eight criminal acts motivated by ethnic hatred in 2014, Croatian police recorded that three of them were against Serbs. Although the state attorney’s office recorded 39 criminal charges for hate crimes, it is unknown how many were perpetrated against Serbs,” she added.
The state attorney office only filed three indictments for hate crimes in response to these 39 criminal charges in 2014. Opacic said there was also a lack of will among police to report hate crimes.
“We witnessed that from the outset, police officials in the field are rejecting the possibility of qualifying cases as hate crimes, which also discourages people from filing criminal charges or informing the police,” she said.
Opacic said that the situation in 2015 appears to have worsened again.
“In the first five months of 2015, we have almost the same number of incidents as in the whole of 2014,” she said.
Opacic believes that the increase is due to the current political climate in which right-wing parties, especially the opposition centre-right Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, use hate speech and ethnic tension as “a motive for animating dissatisfied citizens” in order to win power.
“We can see that the intensity of tensions and incidents in Vukovar fell after the HDZ’s candidate was elected mayor,” she said.
However hate speech and intolerance against Serbs is likely to increase in the political arena as parliamentary elections approach, she said.
According to Opacic, even the governing parties from the left are using similar techniques for approaching voters.
She cited the case of the mayor of Split, Ivo Baldasar, a member of the governing centre-left Social Democratic Party, who in May 2014 participated in the opening of a memorial dedicated to a paramilitary unit from the 1990s war, named after Ustasa commander Rafael Boban.
According to Opacic, all this discourages Serbs from returning to Croatia or and makes others who have come back have second thoughts about staying.
According to the 2011 census, there are 186,633 Serbs in Croatia - 4.4 per cent of the population. Since the last census in the former Yugoslavia in 1991, their numbers have fallen by around 400,000.