Nineteen years after the peaceful UN-led reintegration of eastern Slavonia, a region in today’s eastern part of Croatia, ethnic coexistence remains elusive in the town of Vukovar. For the mainstream Croatian narrative, Vukovar represents a symbol of a war that resulted from the messy dissolution of Yugoslavia and Croatians’ experience with the Serbian-led Yugoslav National Army.

A formerly affluent, traditionally ethnically mixed town, Vukovar was completely leveled in fighting and indiscriminant shelling similar to what is currently happening in Kobani, Syria. Roughly 480 people from the Vukovar area have never been found, while across Croatia, about 1,700 people remain missing, including civilians (both Croats and Serbs) and military personal. The township remained under the jurisdiction of the Serbian Autonomous Oblast until 1995.

Petition to curb minority rights

Earlier this year, Headquarters for the Defense of Croatian Vukovar, a citizens organization, started a petition aimed at changing the minority law. The amendment, if approved, would prevent Serbian minorities from exercising certain rights, and would prevent the public display of their language and Cyrillic script on public buildings unless they accounted for at least 50% of the population within the community. The petition came into being after nameplates were placed on local government buildings in two scripts, Latin and Cyrillic. This was done in an effort to accommodate the bilingual population, but, following demonstrations, the plates were vandalized and removed by Croatian associations of war veterans and missing persons.

A part of Croatian society feels that the timing is still not right for a visible trace of reintegration with Serbs or their culture, including Cyrillic script. Many of these people have signed petitions like the one mentioned above, which received almost 700,000 signatures in two weeks. Unlike the situation on the Istrian peninsula, where the small Italian minority is respected and considered through bilingual postings across the region, acrimony is still widespread across eastern areas.

Informing an uninformed public

The complexity of the situation in eastern Slavonia was seen by the Centre for Peace Studies as an ideal topic for deliberation and discussion. Using a new method we are developing and implementing in Croatia, the project “Polling voices - Citizens debate and advocate for sustainable social change,” inspired by the work of professor James Fishkin from Stanford University, seeks to engage local citizens in informed discussion and promote information sharing that leads to reasoned, well-considered opinions on sensitive topics. (The topic of the first deliberation was the new Labor Act, passed in the Croatian Parliament this summer).

Deliberative polling is a technique whereby randomly sampled groups of citizens engage in deliberation on public policy and electoral issues as a form of public consultation. Citizens are often uninformed about key public issues. Conventional polls represent only surface impressions, and the democratic process of today seems unable to invest time and effort in acquiring information and using it to reach reasoned judgments.

Deliberation on minority rights

The second deliberation poll was organized in October 2014, over a single weekend, under the official title “Implementing minority rights: a chance for integration or a chance for conflict and division?” Every deliberation includes a question-and-answer session with experts, and the panel for this deliberation included academics, NGO representatives, a historian and a representative of the civil initiative Headquarters for the Defense of Croatian Vukovar.

Twenty-four participants, who were randomly assigned into groups with moderators, had the opportunity to come up with questions for the experts and share their views on the topic in the plenary session. A market research agency distributed a questionnaire to participants both before and after the debate, to help measure any changes in opinion brought on by the deliberation.

The Centre for Peace Studies will publish an in-depth analysis of the second deliberation, as it did after the first. It will be interesting to see how and why people changed their beliefs, if at all, on issues of peace building and human rights. As an organization that works to advance both, CPS stresses the dangerous consequences of forming opinions without information gathering and critical thought.

CPS deliberation team: Mirjana Mikić Zeitoun, Ela Naranđa, Petra Jurlina

Advisor: Professor Ana Matan, Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb