Law lecturer feeds Serbian pride

The war is not over for some people in the Balkans. Politicians have signed the Dayton agreement and soldiers put their guns away, but some university professors are still fighting the academic battle.

In Montenegro, a republic which together with Serbia forms the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, students of law are still being taught to be xenophobic and ethnocentric. The postwar message is the same as the wartime one - the spreading and consuming of propaganda is still a duty for each member of society.

This duty is embodied in a text-book for would-be lawyers by a lecturer at the University of Podgorica in the Montenegran capital. "Thanks to the Serbs - Croats and Slovenians finally became equal citizens, got human rights and became nations with a name and dignity," writes Novica Vojinovic.

"From the 7th to the 20th century Slovenians were nothing but slaves, servants, subordinate to the Austrian feudalists and then Serbs made a nation of them," the professor is quoted as saying.

Professor Vojinovic echoes a vocabulary that was used by the politicians who started and run the war, which destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives and houses. In his textbook, which is compulsory for first-year students, there is evidence of more invented "historical truths".

One section reads: "Serbs got the communism from Russians, and Russians from the German Jews Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels and the Russian political protagonist Vladimir Ilich Lenin, whose mother was a Jew from the Polish family Blank and the father was Kalmik from some Moslem ethnic minority. Lenin had slanted eyes."

Zeljko Ivanovic, editor-in-chief of the Montenegro weekly magazine, Monitor, said many students were seeking help. "They are embittered. They have appealed many times at the faculty headquarters and at the relevant ministry. There is nothing left but to conclude that is the official policy of the current regime in Montenegro."

The textbook discovers some previously unknown "truths" without offering sources. For example, it says that during the Bosnian war Serbs were attacked by Nato's nuclear bombs.