Signpost-Smashing Has Become A Routine In Vukovar

0
Vukovar

Croatian nationalists smashed Serbian-script signposts in Vukovar on Tuesday, creating doubt as to whether recent efforts to protect minority rights in the city can take hold.

Vukovar The incident comes a month after a court ordered officials to resolve an issue keeping tensions high in the city, which was reduced to rubble in ethnic fighting of the 1990s.

Police detained five people for questioning, but released them all, the Vecernji List daily reported in its online edition. Among the demolished signposts was one on the entrance to the Vukovar police station, it said.

Last month the Croatian Constitutional Court banned a plan by nationalists to hold a referendum aiming to scrap the right of minorities to have bilingual signposts in municipalities where they make up at least 30 per cent of the population.

The referendum would have affected not just ethnic Serbs, but also Italians and Hungarians. The court said that minority rights guaranteed in the constitution could not be changed with a referendum.

But it did single out Vukovar because of the devastation the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army inflicted on it in 1991 and ordered the Croatian government to find a solution within a year that will be acceptable to both the Serbs and the majority Croats.

Croats and Serbs speak dialects of the same language, but Serbs also use the Cyrillic alphabet. As there are enough of them in Vukovar – around 35 per cent – they have the right to signposts in Cyrillic since a new law came into effect in 2013.

The signpost-smashing has become a routine in Vukovar over the past year since the Serb Cyrillic lettering became mandatory.

Vukovar is the most prominent symbol of Croatia’s 1991-95 war for independence from Yugoslavia. Apart from the destruction it suffered, it was the scene of the single worst atrocity of the war, the massacre of more than 260 Croat prisoners.

The town council late last year even attempted – unsuccessfully – to exempt itself from having to use Cyrillic by proclaiming itself a “city of special significance.”

GNA

Send your news stories to [email protected] Follow News Ghana on Google News

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here