The Vukovar City Council on Thursday decided by a majority vote to change the city statute to remove the provision enabling the official use of the Serbian language and Cyrillic script in that eastern Croatian city.

The decision abolished the statutory decision on the equal official use of the language and script of the Serb ethnic minority in Vukovar, under which its members had the right to freely use the Serbian language and Cyrillic script in social and public life and in official communication on public affairs from within the remit of local government.

The City Council said the decision was based on the official results of the 2021 census, which showed that the share of Serbs in the city’s population is 29.73 ercent, which is less than one third of the total population, meaning that they do not have the right to the official use of their language and script in Vukovar.

In a comment on the decision, the leader of the Democratic Alliance of Serbs and Vukovar City Council member, Srdjan Milakovic, said that this was “a present to the Vukovar Serbs at the end of the year from the political leadership headed by Mayor (Ivan) Penava.”

“This puts an end to the ten-year-long violence against the Cyrillic script and Serbian language during which various state bodies did their best to ensure that the Serb community never gets to exercise this right. The 2021 census was awaited as a solution in the hope that there would be fewer Serbs in Vukovar. Even though the census showed that the share of the Serb community in the city’s population is close to 30 ercent, it never crossed anyone’s mind to keep that right of the Serb community in Vukovar,” Milakovic said.

He concluded that the abolition of the Serb community’s right to bilingualism in Vukovar is one of the many messages to the community from politicians and institutions in Croatia showing that its rights under the law “are granted sparingly and on a case-to-case basis” and that “there is no legal protection for them before Croatian institutions.”