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Internet platform for studying Xenophobia, Radicalism and Problems of Intercultural communication.

Attacks

Attacks Cyrillic or Latin?

During 2013 the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the State Attorney's Office recorded 57 cases of hate crimes (48 cases - hatred based on race, ethnic or national origin). Of these, 35 were classified as criminal offenses. The victims were 19 Serbs, four Roma and three Croats In 2014, 60 such cases were recorded.

Since 2016 Croatia has been regularly reporting hate crimes to the OSCE/ODIHR. Based on this data, from 2016 to 2020 228 hate crimes were committed in the country, including offenses that the government characterizes as hate speech. Of these, 35 crimes were committed in 2016, 25 in 2017, 33 in 2018, 48 in 2019, and 87 in 2020. Approximately half of these crimes are violent attacks by their type. The exception is 2020, the year the coronavirus pandemic began, because due to quarantine restrictions, all activity, including socio-political ones, has moved to the Internet. Accordingly, the most crimes committed that year were vandalism (28) and threats (inciting hatred).

Moreover, of all the vandalism-related crimes, only one was directed against LGBT people, all the other attacks were motivated by racial hatred. If we talk about threats, then the main motivation was again racial hatred (20 episodes), hatred of Muslims was the basis of five crimes and hatred of the Roma was the basis of 1 episode. The main motive for the physical attacks was also racism, followed by hatred of LGBT people and gypsies. However, in 2019, racial hatred accounted for 99% of all motives for xenophobic physical attacks.

At the same time, non-governmental organizations provide different information about hate crimes than official authorities. According to their statistics, physical attacks by non-humans have confidently held the lead all these years, sometimes, for example, in 2020, slightly inferior to vandalism.

It is significant that the attacks against the Serb minority are dissolved in the item "racial bias", although, according to NGOs, they make up the majority of attacks on the so-called. racial grounds. And these attacks are particularly brutal. For example, in February 2019, a group of men attacked three players from the Red Star water polo team in the coastal city of Split. Then, in June, a group of five members of the fan club Hajduk Split Torcida attacked four seasonal workers in the town of Supetar on the island of Brac. Two of the workers were Croatian Serbs.

Then, in August 2019, there were two separate attacks against Croatian Serbs. The Serbs were watching a Red Star Belgrade football match in the bars of the villages of Uzdolje and Cevrske when the attackers broke in. Five people, including a minor, were slightly injured. In December, the Šibenik municipal prosecutor's office charged 15 men allegedly involved in the incident with hate crimes.

The leader of the Serbian National Council, Milorad Pupovac, has been personally attacked several times. When he responded to the brutal attacks on Croatian Serbs in August by warning of rising nationalism in the country, Croatian war veterans filed criminal complaints against Pupovac with the prosecutor's office. War veterans claimed that his statements damaged Croatia's reputation and fomented hatred and violence, but the public prosecutor decided that there was no criminal offense.

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