CONTEMPORARY NATIONAL HISTORY IN BOSNIAK PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS

An analysis of the contents of contemporary national history in official primary and secondary school textbooks and their supplements within the Bosniak educational system in Bosnia-Herzegovina reveals their prime motive: their own people as the victim of primarily Serb aggression and atrocities. Guided by this motive, the authors of the textbooks flagrantly violated the principle of the scientific basis of teaching history. The textbooks contain a number of examples showing history being abused: the use of unreliable sources and pseudo-scientific literature, exaggeration, disparagement, denial and neglect of historical facts, strict adherence to certain events, phenomena, or persons while concealing others, inappropriate comparisons, unfounded claims, and taking historical events, phenomena and processes out of context. Collective suffering and the memory of that suffering, as well as hostility toward neighbors as perpetrators of crimes, are the strongest building blocks of ethnic unity. For this purpose, victimology and Anti-Serb sentiments (Serbophobia) are the essence of Bosniak textbooks on contemporary history and their supplements.