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Lawmakers from ethnic minority parties warned Croatia’s parliament on Tuesday that equality and secularism had been threatened by recent protests in the wartime flashpoint city of Vukovar over the installation of bilingual Latin-Cyrillic signs on state buildings.

“Bilingualism, wherever introduced, means tolerance, in Vukovar as well,” said Furio Radin, a parliamentary representative of Croatia’s Italian minority.

“I never heard of respect without respecting others,” Radin added.

The bilingual signs were installed earlier this month as the Croatian authorities started to introduce the Serbian language and the Cyrillic script into official use in about 20 municipalities like Vukovar where Serbs make up more than a third of the population – a requirement under the country’s minority rights law.

The move sparked a week of protests in Vukovar, where war veterans smashed some of the first bilingual signs.

Milorad Pupovac from the Independent Democratic Serbian Party claimed that this was part of a wider problem of prejudice in the country.

“Secularism, the equality of citizens and other constitutional rights have been obstructed daily and unscrupulously,” Pupovac said during the debate.

“By obstructing basic constitutional values we produce constitutional and judicial insecurity,” he warned.

Nedzad Hodzic, an MP from Croatia’s Bosniak minority, also alleged that legal regulations about the proportional employment of minorities in public services had not been fulfilled.

“The disproportion between the law and the reality is so huge that we often think the law has been intentionally obstructed,” Hodzic said.

The MPs were speaking during a parliamentary debate about the prime minister’s annual state-of-the-nation address.

In the speech, premier Zoran Milanovic said that “human rights are as important as the economy”.

Out of a total of 150 MPs in the Croatian legislature, there are eight parliamentary seats reserved for ethnic minorities.

Three of those are for Serbs, and the other five represent all the other minorities living in Croatia.

Vukovar, on the border with Serbia, was besieged and almost demolished by the Yugoslav Army and Serbian paramilitaries in 1991; the city then became a symbol of Croatian resistance.