ZAGREB, Jan 27(Hina) - The seminar entitled "Holocaust Remembrance Day and Prevention of Crimes Against Humanity" was held in the "Dubrovnik" hotel in Zagreb on Tuesday on the occasion of marking Holocaust Remembrance Day in Croatian
schools for the first time.
ZAGREB, Jan 27(Hina) - The seminar entitled "Holocaust Remembrance Day
and Prevention of Crimes Against Humanity" was held in the "Dubrovnik"
hotel in Zagreb on Tuesday on the occasion of marking Holocaust
Remembrance Day in Croatian schools for the first time.#L#
The seminar was organised by Croatia's Science and Education Ministry
in cooperation with the national institute for the promotion of the
school system and the Council of Europe.
Commemorating the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp on 27
January 1945, the organisers of the event decided to organise the
other seminar, called "Teaching and Learning 20th Century History",
which will take place in the same hotel on Wednesday.
At the start of Tuesday's event, Education Minister Dragan Primorac
said that studying history and the Holocaust had a strong educational
dimension. This is why great responsibility lies with teachers,
professors, institutions and universities which are in charge of
training future teachers, Primorac said.
The competent ministry will invest efforts to enhance the quality of
education and the school system so that history can be taught in a
better way and events from the recent Croatian history can be
presented in a more objective way, the minister said.
Ognjen Kraus, head of the Jewish community in Croatia, said the fact
that education about the Holocaust had started in Croatian schools was
proof that the country was addressing complex issues from the history
in a serious way.
Kraus added that the study of the Holocaust both in Croatia and other
countries needed revision as the actual dimensions of the Holocaust
were still being diminished.
Kraus said that participants in the 2000 international forum in
Stockholm had reached agreement on making the studying of the
Holocaust part of school curricula. He recalled that Pope John Paul II
had contributed to this in the 1990s when, during a visit to Israel,
he apologised to the Jews for all the evils the Catholic Church had
inflicted on them.
The head of the Jasenovac Memorial Centre, Natasa Jovicic, appealed to
competent authorities to responsibly relay to students the real truth
about events in the Second World War.
The head of the Council of Europe's department for the teaching and
learning of history, Alison Cardwell, said this type of seminars
should be aimed at raising a level of tolerance among people, which
she said would be a guarantee that the evil of the Holocaust would
never recur.
(Hina) ms sb