The Minister of Culture, Education, Science and Sports of Montenegro, Vesna Bratic, announced that Serbian authors excluded from textbooks by Milo Djukanovic’s regime will be returned to the curriculum.
This was reported by the Serbian edition of Sputnik radio, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Excluded from school textbooks during the decades under Djukanovic's Democratic Party of Socialists, Serbian writers belong to the elite of South Slavic literature, Vesna Bratić said. Therefore, the relevant department intends to return them to the curriculum.
“There is no more capacious characteristic of fascism than the persecution of people because of their name and ethnicity,” Serbian poet Matija Bečković commented on Bratic’s intention. “The announcement that writers such as Desanka Maksimovic, Mesa Selimovic or Aleksa Šantić will be returned to the Montenegrin school curriculum stops the ethnic cleansing of Serbian writers in the Montenegrin school curriculum that was carried out by the former government.”
Historian Cedomir Antić believes that with this move Montenegrin education will be deprovincialized because the poets and writers excluded from school curricula are not regional Serbian writers, but belong to a very important and influential South Slavic culture. He estimates that by excluding Serbian writers and poets from school curricula, Milo Djukanovic's government intended to deprive the rights of a third of Montenegro's population, that is, those who speak the Serbian language and belong to Serbian culture.
Classics of Serbian literature Milovan Glisic, Jovan Jovanovic Zmaj, Stevan Sremac, the epic poem Hasanaginica have been excluded from the curriculum for primary and secondary schools in Montenegro since independence in 2006. In addition to them, such modern authors as Miloš Crnjanski, Milutin Bojić, Oskar Davičo, Milorad Pavic, Aleksandar Tišma, Antonije Isaković, Ljubomir Simović, Dobrica Cosic were excluded. Instead, places in textbooks were taken by Montenegrin nationalist authors, mostly unknown to the general public.