20,000 Protest Against Cyrillic In Croatian Capital

More than 20,000 flag-waving Croatians protested on Sunday on Zagreb’s main square against the introduction of the Serbian Cyrillic script for official use in the town of Vukovar.

Police reported that the 2-hour protest passed without incident as public transport was halted in the city centre. Early the US Ambassador had advised US citizens in Zagreb to avoid the central square. The protestors are pressuring the Croatian government to back down with plans to introduce Serbian Cyrillic on all signs as part of the Constitutional Law on the Rights of Ethnic Minorities.The law allows for ethnic minorities, where they made up more than a third of a city’s population, to be entitled to have their language used for official purposes. Around 35% of Vukovar’s population made up of Serbian nationals.

Organisers of the protest claim that introducing the Cyrillic script in Vukovar is to win a few Serb votes at the coming elections and they say they will not allow the introducing to happen.

“We’re not barbarians, we love our country more than anything else. We’re against a forceful introduction of Cyrillic in our beautiful Vukovar,” One of the organisers told the gathering.