At its session on Thursday, the City Council of Vukovar adopted a decision on changes to the City Statute, which removes the right of the Serbian minority to use the Cyrillic alphabet.
It was decided to delete the provisions on the official use of the Serbian language and the Cyrillic script, and thus to put out of force the Statutory Decision on achieving equal official use of the language and script of the Serbian national minority in the area of the City of Vukovar, which gave members of the Serbian national minority the right to freely use Serbian language and the Cyrillic alphabet in social and public life and in official communication in public affairs from the self-governing sphere, reports Index.hr.
In the explanation of the decision on the amendments to the Statute, it was stated that it was adopted based on the official results of this year's population census, which show that 29,73 percent of Serbs live in Vukovar, which is less than one third, which is why Serbs no longer exercise the right to officially use the Serbian language and the Cyrillic alphabet. According to the 2011 census, Serbs made up 34,8 percent of the population in Vukovar.
3,2 percent of Serbs live on the territory of Croatia today (2011 percent in 4,36). Before the outbreak of the civil war in 1991, Serbs made up 12,2 percent of the total population of Croatia (581.663).
According to the Law on the Rights of National Minorities from 2002, the equal official use of the language and script used by members of the national minority is achieved in the territory of the local self-government unit when members of the minority make up at least a third of the population, which in Vukovar was met with strong resistance by "defenders" and a Croatian population.
Making up illiteracy
Tatjana Tagirov was in "Vremen" 10 years ago in the text Making up illiteracy wrote about the linguistic skirmishes between Belgrade and Zagreb, during which some claimed that the Cyrillic alphabet was an old Croatian script, while others rejected the constitutional provisions to return the Cyrillic alphabet to public life in towns and cities where Serbs make up more than a third of the population
The Croats stole the language from the Serbs, and now they are also stealing the Cyrillic alphabet, could be heard in Serbia at the time, in the midst of the debate - controversy and opposition - about the introduction of the Cyrillic alphabet in Vukovar and other towns and cities where, according to the results of the 2011 population census, the Serbian the minority exceeded a third of the population.
Thus, the Serbian linguist, Professor Miloš Kovačević, then recalled that at the scientific meeting of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (HAZU) at the end of 2012, the thesis was heard that "from the 11th to the 18th century, in large parts of the Croatian territory, the population expressed its cultural needs (i) Cyrillic", and that on medieval monuments "Cyrillic and Glagolitic are mixed". Kovačević calls it, as reported by some Serbian media, "Croatian make-up of the past", and says that Croats only remembered "their" Cyrillic alphabet in 2012 because of their path towards the EU, because in Brussels they want to have the right of precedence over language and alphabet from the Balkans.
No matter how much some tried to deny the origin of the Cyrillic alphabet, a very clear provision of the Constitutional Law on the Rights of National Minorities, as well as legal provisions on the application of minority scripts in official use in Croatia, the real alarm was raised after the Croatian Government finally decided to act according to the letter of the law and, where the conditions are met (more than a third of the minority population), the laws are applied. As expected, the biggest noise was made in Vukovar, a city that suffered heavily in the war and in which the wounds of war have not yet healed.
You can read the entire text of Tatjana Tagirov HERE
MN/FoNet
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