ROUND TABLE

I am particularly pleased and grateful to Mr Ante Beljo and the Croatian Heritage Foundation and to all of you, dear friends, historians, journalists, experts in various fields, guests from various countries, that we could be together these three days and plead for something which has become of life importance, not only for the Croatian people, but for many peoples, not only for those that have become victims but also for those who are responsible for their destiny. It does not matter whether they are responsible because of their negligence, omission or wrong evaluation, or because they directly helped the aggressor, the attacker through political alliances or imposing embargoes on the victim, so that the victim could not defend himself despite all UN conventions on sovereignty and the right to self-defence. I would just like to refer to the language problem which, for a long time, has been in fact a synonym, a paradigm for a state, a people, an identity, an existence, for elementary freedom. All of us who studied in Sarajevo, Split and Zagreb were witnesses to the way students and pupils were treated, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina. If we were to start presenting the facts here to you who come from so-called free countries: England, USA, Canada and elsewhere, it would seem to you, like it does to most journalists and politicians today, that these are but exaggerations, figments of the imagination, some inner impetus caused by dissatisfaction or unachieved conditions of life which rebound as laying the blame and responsibility on others.

I shall mention just some facts as an illustration. In my native town of Citluk, I remember, in 1960/61, about 98% of the population was Croatian. Of the 22 school teachers, 21 were Serbian or Montenegrin and all of them called the language Serbo-Croatian or Serbian. The only teacher to call the language Croatian was the German language teacher who was of Croatian nationality. It is not necessary to go back in time to the year 1971 and to mention the burning of Croatian spelling and grammar books, burned on orders by the government, that is the Party, or more precisely by the Serbs; even today this sounds unbelievable. We were forced to reprint an edition abroad and the Croatian spelling and grammar book was published in England, the so-called Londoner, and this was in fact the only book of its kind which the Croats might have at home or abroad. And those who managed to smuggle a copy of this book into the country, remember this was not a political brochure but just a spelling book, were arrested and sentenced to several years prison. This was happening in Croatia in the 20th century while western countries, pleaders of democracy, were great friends to both Tito, to Rankovic previously and other UDBA chiefs (Yugoslav secret police). Today, therefore, when we are faced with these problems - from where do these imperialist genocidal ideas which caused such terrifying wars and aggression come from - we must mention just a few of these facts as we have touched on similar taboo themes these days. For example, Mrs Ljubica Stefan informed us of the complete extermination of the Jews in Serbia, a theme previously completely prohibited. Some other lecturers have mentioned various forms of genocide or cultural and language cleansing, carried out as preconceived plan for that which is occurring today and these past years as a conclusion. It wasn’t done only here in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina but in free countries abroad. Ante Beljo, Gojko Susak, Vinko Grubisic and many others, myself included, who have worked abroad for many years as a team, know how difficult it was to organise schools of Croatian language, to publish Croatian language handbooks, to find books in the public libraries of Toronto, Washington, New York or Chicago. Let me illustrate this with some facts. I am sure you all remember, and this is often the case even today, on the large stations such as BBC, CBC, RAI, Voice of America, the language was always Serbo-Croatian or more often than not Serbian. The major part of the audience of those radio stations, here or abroad, was unfortunately Croatian. At that time, there were very many more Croat emigrants in comparison to Serbs; the ratio was almost 6:1 in Europe. The same was true for America and Canada until recently due to the large number of Serbs that have left/fled Milosevic’s “democracy” and Karadzic’s “heaven”. There has been a similar ratio in America throughout this century, precisely from the end of the last century up to the present day. For example, in 1989, at the radio station Voice of America the ratio of employees was l2:2 (twelve Serbs, two Croats). The Croats were also chosen according to certain standards. I have no intention of offending or injuring any of the employees, but I would just like to mention these standards, namely, the Croats had to be “politically correct”. These same employment standards were applied at home.

For instance, in 1985, at about 100 American and Canadian universities that had Slavic or South Slavic language departments, instead of the Croatian language, Serbo-Croatian was taught. According to a study we prepared for an international teachers’ conference in 1986, at the 100 universities where Serbo-Croatian was taught, there were more than a hundred professors of this subject, yet less than 200 students, all studying a non-existent but forced Serbo-Croatian language. In comparison, the Croatian schools in America and Canada known as HISAC, had, in Toronto, that is Ontario, alone a total of 2,568 students. There were also 476 students in Ontario who studied Serbian and 71 who studied or were taught Serbo-Croatian. In fact, those who were taught Serbo-Croatian called it such because they were really being taught either Serbian or Croatian due to the fact the Consulate had organised a school but they didn’t know whose school it was. So, 83% of the students studied Croatian, l5% Serbian and 2% Serbo-Croatian, yet the universities continued to open their doors to Serbo-Croatian only. Every attempt to introduce the Croatian language for the children of Croatian parents was stopped and according to our research this was always in a direct or explicit, and sometimes indirect, co-operation with Yugoslav diplomatic offices. This was how it functioned until at one of the conferences of the American Association for Advancement of Slavic Studies, known as the A.S.S., we simply faced all these teachers from all 100 universities with the simple choice - bread or politics; if you want to eat teacher’s bread you will teach students the language they have been learning for 8 or 12 years in Croatian schools throughout America, Canada and Australia, or you will not have a single student. It was then that Prof. Magnar of Pennsylvania University (the author of the standard Serbo-Croatian grammar) advised his colleagues. We were sitting opposite each other and he asked me with his eyes what I would tell him. I simply said: ”Professor, just say whatever you consider to be honourable, your opinion as a linguist. Say what will be useful to the students. I am not going to suggest anything to you. We are now preparing 5,000 students who will arrive tomorrow and insist on enrolling in Croatian language studies in your department, to study the language they speak at home, read in the newspapers and in the books they have and is the only language they have been learning”. Then he took a courageous stand and said to his colleagues: ”I would recommend you give Croatian language lectures to Croatian children and Serbian language lectures to Serbian children". The 120 professors and experts from various universities who were present were silent. We all left without a word.

By the next year’s conference, Prof. Magnar had prepared a new grammar; it was a grammar of the Croatian and Serbian languages. Even though the grammars were not in separate books, at least they were differentiated. He received such a hysterical backlash from Belgrade and from the professors of the so-called Serbo-Croatian language, including professor Surducki of the Toronto University, that he could but answer in approximately one sentence: ”I am not burdened with nationalist motivation. I just follow the rules of linguistics". This is how the situation started to change. In 1985, the Croatian language could be found on the list of possible languages which could be studied or taught by professors of the largest Slavic association.

The Serbian language was not there. After almost ten years of hard work, we placed them before an accomplished fact, either all languages were to be treated equally or we would pose the question of discrimination towards a people and their language by the highest scientific body to Congress in Washington. This letter, after many other letters, really caused an alarm and the A.S.S. finally, in 1986, at our explicit request, introduced the Croatian, Macedonian and Serbian languages and left, for those who haven’t yet realised the difference, Serbo-Croatian. Consequently, the number of languages the experts are allowed to know, to study and to teach, has increased from 22 to 32 from the regions of middle, eastern and southern Europe. I would like to conclude now by remarking that among the reasons we mentioned, the Croatian Ethnic Institute in Chicago, of which I am the principal, has collected over 300 newspapers, reviews and magazines which the Croats have published outside their mother country and none of them has ever been written in other language than Croatian. I attempted in one of my research studies to discover how our first Croatian workers in Canada related to their mother language. Going through 12,000 pages of various material such as the minutes of Croatian Peasant Party meetings and other Croatian organisations from 1920 to 1945 I was not able to find a single reference to the Serbo-Croatian language; it was always simply called the Croatian language. Most members of those organisations were persons with elementary school education or even self-educated. Their consciousness of identity, national and linguistic, was clear and was clouded only in the consciousness of those who determined the destiny of that people and many others and who are to blame for the events of today and that is why we are here to prevent these things from happening again.

Ante Beljo: I would like to thank Father Ljubo Krasic for his words.

Ante Beljo