Destruction of books in post-independence Croatia

The destruction of books occurred in Croatia in the period leading up to and following its independence from Yugoslavia. Books were destroyed from 1990, shortly before the outbreak of the Croatian War of Independence, to 2010.

Between 1991 and 1992, many libraries and other cultural institutions in Croatia sustained war-related damage, and the Yugoslav People's Army's shelling of such sites resulted in the destruction of many books. In 1992, the Croatian government introduced the Obligatory Instructions on the Use of Library Funds of School Libraries, which decreed the removal of all books that had been published in Serbia or printed in the Cyrillic script. Many were subsequently discarded or destroyed on the pretext of removing outdated books. In 1993, the Slovenian newspaper Delo published an article exploring the politically motivated destruction of books in Croatia, and in 1998, the journalist Milan Kangrga published an article in the Feral Tribune about the discarding of Serbian-language books from a library in Korčula.

With the exception of a 2003 special issue printed by the Serbian Cultural Society Prosvjeta and a 2012 monograph written by the author Ante Lešaja, the subject was not afforded much scholarly attention in the decades after the Yugoslav Wars. The scholar Dora Komnenović argues that the phenomenon of libricide (Knjigocid), also referred to as bibliocide, bookocide and "book cleansing" by some intellectuals, was distinct from the shelling of libraries and destruction of books in wartime. Lešaja estimates that around 2.8 million books were discarded or destroyed between 1990 and 2010, amounting to more than 13 percent of all library books in Croatia.

Destruction of books in wartime
In 1991, Croatian irregulars established their headquarters in the Bishop's Library in Pakrac. The library was subsequently ransacked and its books burned. After the library of Matica Srpska in Novi Sad, it housed the second largest collection of medieval Serbian manuscripts in the world, some of which had been evacuated to Zagreb during World War II and had escaped destruction at the time.

For its part, the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) shelled multiple libraries in cities such as Dubrovnik, Zadar, Vukovar and Vinkovci, among others. One list compiled by Croatia's Ministry of Culture recorded 210 libraries, museums and archives as having been damaged or destroyed as a result of the conflict. The destruction and damage inflicted upon cultural monuments, including libraries, contributed to the negative public perception of the JNA both domestically and globally. "During the course of the conflict ... the Croatian government, bruised by their own cultural and literary losses, began to display an awareness for the reprehensibility of such actions," the scholar Rebecca Knuth writes. This conclusion has been criticized by the scholar Robert M. Hayden; "[s]ince the actions analyzed by Lešaja mainly took place well after the end of the war," Hayden writes, "it seems that the Croatian government learned, rather, about the dangers of destroying books in public."

Legal framework
In 1992, the Croatian government introduced the Obligatory Instructions on the Use of Library Funds of School Libraries, which decreed the removal of all literature that had been published in Serbia or printed in the Cyrillic script. Although public libraries in Croatia fall under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Culture, school and scientific libraries fall under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Science and Education. The Instruction decreed that school library inventories were to be stocked with books "exclusively by Croatian authors, with books written in the Croatian literary language using the Latin script." Some libraries merely removed undesirable books from their inventories, instead of destroying them outright. Such an approach was exemplified by the Binding Instruction on the Usage of School Library Book Inventories (Obavezni naputak o korištenju knjižnog fonda u školskim bibliotekama), which was signed by Croatia's Minister of Education, Vesna Girardi-Jurkić. One of the Binding Instruction's passages read as follows: "Ideological literature from the past system that provides its own interpretation of historical truth may be placed in a special collection in adequate numbers as testimony to a specific period, while the remainder, in compliance with library regulations, should be offered to an appropriate library that preserves such collections, etc." The campaign to remove "politically and religiously incorrect books" from Croatian libraries was spearheaded by Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) activists. Books by Serbs, pro-Yugoslavs, leftists and homosexuals were especially targeted. A label with a folk motif was used to distinguish Croatian books from non-Croatian ones. The destruction of books was accompanied by attempts to "purify" the Croatian language of words with foreign roots, particularly those that were common to both Croatian and Serbian.



"The Government will introduce measures for inciting the publishing that the Croatian state needs," Croatia's Minister of Finance, Borislav Škegro, remarked in 1997. "For instance, public libraries will be financed to remove books in Serbian and similar languages, or those with inappropriate and obsolete translations." Forty-thousand copies of the Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia were discarded or destroyed. During Croatian president Franjo Tuđman's tenure, the Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić was blacklisted by the Croatian government. Ivan Cankar, August Cesarec and Branko Ćopić were also among the authors from the former Yugoslavia whose books were targeted. The works of non-Serb authors such as Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo and Friedrich Nietzsche were treated similarly. Also viewed as undesirable were the works of Jack London, Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde, which were perceived as promoting socialism, atheism and homosexuality, respectively. "The aim of the book cleansing was to remove all non-Croatian authors," the sociologist Božidar Jakšić has claimed.

In 1993, the Slovenian newspaper Delo published an article exploring the politically motivated destruction of books in Croatia, prompting a rebuke from multiple Croatian media outlets. On 30 March 1998, the journalist Milan Kangrga published an article in the Feral Tribune titled Hrvatski knjigocid: Barbarizam i renesansa (Croatian Libricide: Barbarism and Renaissance). The article examined a librarian's removal of 100–150 Serbian-language books from a library on the island of Korčula and their subsequent disposal in a garbage container. It marked the first time that the term knjigocid (libricide) appeared in connection to the destruction of books in Croatia. The term has also been translated as bibliocide and bookocide. The librarian mentioned in Kangrga's article later sued him for defamation and was awarded substantial monetary compensation, although the ruling was later reversed on appeal. According to the scholar Dora Komnenović, this remains the only instance of libricide in Croatia ever taken to court. "[T]he episode constitutes a paradigmatic example of prosecution against the critics of libricide," Komnenović writes. The destruction of books in Croatia was mentioned in a 2001 United Nations report. Writing the same year, the historian Vjeran Pavlaković noted, "it is ... impossible to find any books in Cyrillic for sale anywhere, except for a few hard to find places such as the Serbian Cultural Society's tiny library."

Research
In 2003, the Serbian Cultural Society Prosvjeta published a special issue of its journal titled Bibliocide-Culturecide: Where One Burns Books, One Will Soon Burn People, which explored the destruction of books in post-independence Croatia. It carried contributions from several scholars who had conducted research on the topic, such as Igor Lasić and Ante Lešaja, as well as reprints of articles that had been published in several Croatian newspapers, such as Feral Tribune, Novi list and Tjednik. The special issue was re-published in English in 2005. In response to the destruction of books, many public intellectuals signed letters of protest. Croatia's Ministry of Culture, the Croatian Library Association and the Croatian Council for Libraries, all denied that the destruction of books was systemic, instead arguing that instances of libricide were "sporadic, singular episodes". They also questioned the value of the discarded books and relativized their destruction by describing Serbs as "aggressors".

In 2012, Lešaja published a monograph titled Libricide: The Destruction of Books in Croatia in the 1990s. He estimated that around 2.8 million books had been removed from Croatian libraries between 1990 and 2010. Lešaja estimates that the collections of Croatia's public, school and university libraries shrank by around 13.33 percent between 1990 and 2010. This mostly affected books printed in Cyrillic, published in Serbia or written by a Serb or "leftist" author. Around 55 percent of the discarded books originated in elementary school libraries. Many were destroyed on the pretext of weeding out and discarding old books, which is standard procedure in all libraries. Lešaja argues that the removal of "unsuitable" books was systematic and that such books were subjected to a policy of "exclusionism". "The "libricide" Lešaja refers to needs to be distinguished from the war-related destruction of libraries, archives, religious objects and cultural heritage in general in the former Yugoslavia," Komnenović writes. She argues that the Croatian authorities made the systemic destruction of books possible by placing individuals who wished to see them destroyed in positions of authority, as well as by fostering "exclusionism" and "anti-intellectualism". According to Komnenović, "exclusionism ... was principally directed toward the following categories: Tito's Yugoslavia as a state community, socialism as ideology and practice, the National Liberation Struggle and antifascism (1941–1945), the Serbs as people (including the Croatian Serbs), the working people, and any type of disagreement with governmental policies."

With the exception of Prosvjeta's 2003 special issue and Lešaja's book, the targeting of books by the Croatian authorities was not afforded much scholarly attention in the decades after the Yugoslav Wars, unlike the war-related destruction of Croatian libraries and archives, which according to Komnenović, "was documented in a timely way." Lešaja compares the phenomenon to the systemic destruction of anti-fascist monuments by Croatian nationalists in the 1990s. In 2016, the writer Dubravka Ugrešić claimed that the destruction of 2.8 million books had taken place without any significant protest from the Croatian public.

Commemoration
In June 2015, the non-profit Multimedia Institute, in coordination with the curatorial collective What, How & For Whom (WHW), publicly appealed for the scanning and preservation of books that had been targeted by the Government of Croatia in the 1990s. In conjunction with an exhibit titled ''Otpisane, povodom 20. godišnjice Oluje'' (Discarded: On the Occasion of the 20th Anniversary of Operation Storm), which took place between 18 June and 13 July 2015, the Multimedia Institute and WHW scanned 173 such books and made them available online. Four prominent Croatian artists, Siniša Labrović, Božena Končić-Badurina, Antonio Grgić and Luiza Margan, also took part in the exhibition. "By focusing on the destruction of books," Komnenović writes, "the exhibition curators wanted to address the wider context, preceding or following Operation Storm, in which the simultaneous destruction of monuments, houses and the killing of people were made possible, both inside and outside the war zones."

Other incidents
In February 2018, an effigy of the Croatian-language LGBTQ+ children's book My Rainbow Family was publicly burned by right-wing activists.