BALKANS: New Battle Begins Over What to Remember

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Sep 15 2005 (IPS) - For the first time since 1991, Serbian eighth graders and high school seniors have been provided new history textbooks ‘cleansed’ of communist ideology and nationalist stereotypes.

“Our aim was to speak without hatred and desire for revenge about the recent events,” editor of the new history textbooks at the Office for Textbooks and Educational Tools Jasmina Milanovic told media representatives.

The revised history curriculum deals with the period from World War II until today. That curriculum had remained almost unchanged under the strong influence of communist ideology in Serbia.

The communists fell from power in 2000, with the departure of former president Slobodan Milosevic who led Serbia into wars against neighbouring Croatia and Bosnia on the slogan of keeping former Yugoslavia together. The wars led to the death of more than 200,000 people, mostly non-Serbs, and confirmed the break-up of Yugoslavia.

The wars still cause deep division among Serbs. Many think they were unjust, but others still believe that they were waged to protect Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia. The history books seek to change such ideas.

“Our aim was to collect and present the information the students have already obtained or are obtaining in their families, and through media,” Milanovic told IPS. “It was high time to put that into the textbooks.”

The old textbooks were outdated, and “in collision with reality,” historian Predrag Markovic told IPS. “In the 90s, they served to justify wars.”

Under Milosevic, the history textbooks saw some minor revisions brought in to blame Croats and Bosniaks for the wars. Some further changes were introduced after he fell from power, in which the wars were simply omitted.

Now Serbian students are being taught that Serbian leadership was opposing democratic changes in the 1990s (when Croatia and Bosnia decided in referendums that they would leave former Yugoslavia).

Milosevic’s regime “lacked political tolerance and arrested political adversaries,” and his era was marked by isolation of Serbia and mass robbery of ordinary people by the political elite, a textbook says.

But students in other ex-Yugoslav republics are not necessarily being taught similar things.

In Bosnia-Herzegovina, disputes among Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs have prevented the introduction of a common history curriculum. The country is divided into two entities, the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Republic of Srpska, which has a Serb population.

The problem is with history and geography books. Common textbooks were introduced for subjects like mathematics, chemistry, biology and physics.

Another problem is the language. All three groups find it necessary to call the language spoken in the country by their own separate name (Bosnian, Croat or Serb) regardless of the fact that it is the same language.

Students in the Republic of Srpska mostly have textbooks coming from Serbia proper, while Croat children use textbooks from Croatia. Only the Bosniak students use textbooks issued in capital Sarajevo.

This situation prevails despite years of efforts by the Office of the High Representative, an international body overseeing post-war developments, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and many non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to introduce more or less neutral history textbooks.

The Council of Europe, a 41-nation inter-governmental organisation, went so far as to suggest that the recent history of Bosnia be omitted from textbooks in order to avoid confusion.

Common guidelines advising a non-aggressive approach to distant and modern history were set out in 2003. But no common history textbooks could be created.

“It is true that history or geography textbooks used in Bosnia-Herzegovina do not have the same approach, despite the guidelines,” Zijad Pasic, minister for education and science told Sarajevo media.

“Some events are somehow differently described by authors from the Federation and Republic of Srpska…we should avoid the situation of having three biographies of Bosnia-Herzegovina in a certain historic period,” he added.

This seems hard as neither Croat nor Serb children are taught that Bosnia-Herzegovina is their homeland. For them it is either Croatia or Serbia. In their textbooks their Bosniak neighbours are described as oppressive ‘Turks’ who conquered and occupied the region centuries ago.

On the other hand, Bosniak children learn that the arrival of the Turkish Ottoman Empire in the Balkans was “the liberation.” Heroes for some are villains for others.

“That is not the road to a brighter future,” Nenad Sebek from the Centre for Democracy and Reconciliation in South-Eastern Europe (CDSEE), an NGO working to help improve history teaching in the region, told IPS.

“We’re trying the approach that would show how people in the region had a long history of tolerance and cooperation in economy and society,” he said. “We’re trying to point out that history is much more than history of recent conflicts. But there has to be more goodwill on all sides to succeed.”