Zoltan Bunjik was quoted by the 'Gradjanski list' daily on Monday as saying that the ban especially affected first-grade classes in Croatian "as the import of primers was also banned".
He said that the Serbian education ministry had imposed the ban, although it was the usual practice to supply textbooks for minority pupils from abroad in cases when it was impossible or too expensive to print such books in Serbia.
The Croat National Council in Serbia-Montenegro, however, has already supplied ethnic Croat pupils in Vojvodina with textbooks obtained in Croatia.
"The school year has begun and we could not allow children and schools to become the victims of the inert administration of the Serbian Education Ministry, which has not yet given the formal approval for the use of the textbooks in question," the council's executive committee chairman Lazo Vojnic Hajduk told Hina last week,
He added that the council, as well as representatives of other ethnic minorities, had forwarded the request for the use of textbooks to the ministry in June, but had not received any answer yet.