Ethnic minority representatives warned at a Wednesday’s seminar on national minorities and the media in Croatia of more widespread and brutal hate speech in the country, as well as reduction in content for ethnic minorities on national television.

Hate speech and inappropriate language we are increasingly exposed to do not only threaten the national minorities’ sense of security, but also ruin the image of Croatia as a democratic society, said Branko Socanac, assistant head of the government’s office on human rights and rights of national minorities.

He added that Croatia had an enviable normative standard of protection of national minorities’ rights, but that they face problems in everyday implementation of that standard.

The national broadcaster, HTV’s, programme for national minorities is getting sparser and weaker, Chairman of the National Minorities Council Aleksandar Tolnauer said.

According to data from HTV, only 60 and a half hours of programme intended for national minorities aired in all four channels last year.

“We are not asking anyone to create a programme out of something that is not there, because members of national minorities should give cause for reports, but the problem is in the political representation of national minorities, which is, to put it mildly, disastrous,” Tolnauer said.

Tolnauer criticised HTV for its tendency to reduce the issues of national minorities to customs and culture, when its task should be to assist their integration into society with all their problems.

Croatia, as well as other parts of Europe, is experiencing a dramatic clash of populism with the political mainstream, more and more visible in the media, and resulting in hate speech becoming more common, said the representative of the Hungarian national minority in Croatia, Robert Jankovics.

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