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New study questions values taught in
Croatia�s textbooks
By Vlasta Kovac
ZAGREB, Croatia, Dec. 17
(JTA) � Croatian textbooks are teaching violence and
intolerance.
This was the conclusion drawn by Natasha Jovicich, who
initiated a study of 23 textbooks used in Croatian elementary
schools.
Jovicich is the new director of the museum at Jasenovac,
the concentration camp operated by Croatia�s wartime Ustashe fascist
regime. She initiated the study to draw attention to the basic values
being taught to Croatian children.
The textbooks were analyzed by a
group of high school teachers, with special emphasis on subjects like
history and literature.
The results, which Jovicich called
�shocking,� appeared in the latest edition of the Croatian weekly magazine
Globus. Among the findings:
� In a history book for eighth graders,
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is ridiculed by being depicted as
a bulldog sitting on the British flag.
� On the same page, there is
a photograph of a yellow Star of David, and a caption saying, �The Jews
had to wear a special mark, the Star of David. This is a six-pointed star.
It consists of two triangles, which symbolize the sky and the earth.�
There is no mention of the discrimination suffered by those forced to wear
the symbol.
� The same history book shows the picture of Croatian
wartime leader Ante Pavelic. The accompanying caption describes him as �a
jurist, politician and the founder of the Ustashe movement,� but makes no
mention of the war crimes committed under his rule.
�This textbook
is a dangerous manipulation of history,� professor Rosana Ratkovchich, one
of those conducting the study, wrote in her conclusion.
The book
was guilty of �relativizing� fascism and the antifascist struggle to the
point of rendering them morally indistinguishable, she wrote.
A
caption that appears under a photo of Normandy Beach on D-Day, she wrote,
creates the impression that the German army had moral superiority during
the war.
Jovicich was quoted in Globus as saying that there is a
�direct connection with the kind of intolerance that we find in these
textbooks and the growing violence manifested by young people.�
A
recent concert in the Croatian coastal town of Split, for example,
attracted some 40,000 young people to the soccer stadium. Many of them
wore the Ustashe insignia and waved Nazi flags.
The incident
prompted some Croatian legislators to sponsor a bill that would
criminalize the glorification of Nazi ideology.
The bill is still
being debated in Parliament.
Until recently, Jovicich worked in
Croatia�s Ministry of Education, where she initiated several pilot
programs to introduce Holocaust education into Croatian schools.
In
October, she proposed that Croatia join an international task force
dedicated to promoting Holocaust education.
Croatia is now being
monitored by four members of the task force � the United States, Israel,
France and Argentina � to see what will come out of plans to introduce
Holocaust education in Croatian schools.
Meanwhile, the Jewish
community of Zagreb, which has been promised $20,000 from the Claims
Conference to train educators to teach about the Holocaust, reached an
agreement with the Adam Institute in Jerusalem to organize a seminar on
the topic.
About 16 instructors are planning to attend the seminar
next month. Later, they will organize workshops and train others to teach
the subject.
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The Catholic Church says
that it is impermissible to use any sort of contraception for birth
control. Women who were exposed to mass rapes during the war in Bosnia
were allowed to use contraceptives, but under one important condition. If
they knew or had a premonition that they were going to be raped, they had
the obligation, before taking contraceptives, to run, or
avoid.
Tonci Matulic, in Glas Koncila [newspaper published
by the Catholic Church in Croatia], March
2001. |
