Serbian students study the history of their country using textbooks published in Croatia that distort past events.
Deputy Alexander Sheshel stated this in the Serbian parliament, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“We had the opportunity to see a large number of scandalous textbooks. Today, most of the publishing houses “Klet”, “Logos”, BIGZ represented in Serbia belong to “Školska knjiga” from Zagreb,” Seselj said.
According to him, these textbooks justify the abduction of children from Serbian families by the Ottoman Empire. They also printed falsified maps showing the Serbian state surrounded by a fictitious “Croatian Empire.”
“We allowed these people to make money here. We are to blame for this. I want to ask: does anyone from the Serbian Ministry of Education or any other institution read these textbooks before they appear in schools?” the deputy is outraged.
He predicts that if this policy continues, the existence of concentration camps for Serbs, in which 700 thousand people were killed, may be justified in the future.
“Tomorrow we will read that the bombing of Yugoslavia was a useful thing, an opportunity to refresh diplomatic relations with the international community. We will see that the Hague Court made the necessary decisions for the Serbian people, and was not a political instrument aimed at the collapse of Yugoslavia. All this can happen to us if we continue to pretend that we don’t have problems with textbooks,” Seselj warned.
He also recalled that in Serbia there are state publishing houses that should receive orders for the preparation of textbooks.
“I believe that our culture, education, preservation of our national and cultural identity are more important than competition in this market. We need to form historical approaches ourselves in order to create our own identity and national mentality. Then we will take our rightful place in the international community. Now they are telling us about some kind of cultural barrier that exists between the EU and Serbia, that we are worse than them,” the parliamentarian noted.
Aleksandar Seselj believes that a “silent cultural occupation” is underway in Serbia, with representatives of Western non-governmental organizations convincing the population that their country carried out ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and committed ethnic genocide in Srebrenica.
“They present it as a generally accepted fact that we bombed ourselves, that is, we are to blame for the NATO bombing. This is what has been steadily advancing in the fields of culture and education over the past 20 years,” stated the Serbian deputy.