In a student hubbub, teenagers, bags on their shoulders, head towards the establishment of Austro-Hungarian architecture where their school is housed. It’s time to go to class. The crowd splits curiously in two, when crossing the gates that surround the playground. The left portal for some; the one on the right for the others. Because here, within the same premises of this school in Travnik, a city in central Bosnia-Herzegovina, there is not one, but two schools in reality: a private Catholic center, where lessons are given according to the Croatian curriculum, and the public secondary school in Travnik, following the Bosnian curriculum. A division that is projected symbolically on the facade, opulent and renovated for the Catholic, washed out for the other.
In a Bosnia-Herzegovina still marked by segregation, thirty years after the war, young people go to school there in dispersed order. And yet, these students of Travnik, like the communities of the country, almost all speak the same language, except for a few words. Physically, nothing could differentiate them either. Only thirty years ago, before the outbreak of war in 1992, their parents lived in the Yugoslav federation, where ethnicity hardly mattered. Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, Bosnian Muslims: all were “South Slavs”, each cultivating a different religion, of course, but far from fundamentalism. A bloody conflict and 100,000 deaths later, this harmonious mosaic of the Balkans is only a shadow of itself.
The peace decreed by the Dayton Accords in 1995 effectively put an end to hostilities, while “freezing” the conflict on ethno-confessional grounds. The country has inherited a political and institutional layering that continues to fragment it, to disunite it, which undermines the prospect of a common education system.
In the Bosnian-Croat Federation, one of the two regional entities institutionalized after the war, the Travnik school belongs to the system of “two schools under the same roof”, where pupils from different communities share the same building, without studying together. It was the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) which, at the end of the war, proposed this formula – originally temporary – intended to encourage the return of refugees and displaced persons to their town or village. native. But due to a lack of political will, this model took root. Barely fifty schools function in this way, the majority of the other schools in the federation operating in a purely “mono-ethnic” way. The courses there differ according to ethnicity, the history books too. To each “his roof”, his manuals, his national novel.
Yugoslav collapse
Wedged in an armchair in his office displaying liturgical objects, Mgr Željko Marić, the rector of the Catholic Center in Travnik, believes that the three “constituent” peoples of Bosnia have the right to their separate and “national” schooling. He also uses the “Croatian” idiom: “Sometimes people in Bosnia say, ‘We all understand each other, why make such a fuss about the language?’ But the language has its development, its changes, its values and cannot be subject to political experiments”, he argues.
The defunct communist Yugoslavia did nothing but repress, according to the ecclesiastic, legitimate feelings of identity. “It was just a matter of time before it collapsed. There are reasons why the war was so brutal…”
His establishment, founded at the end of the 19the century by Jesuits, shortly after the Ottoman occupation, had to cease its activities “in 1945 with the arrival of Yugoslav power, which expelled the teachers”. The Catholic school was reopened in 1998, at the instigation of an archdiocese.
Mgr Željko Marić, dressed in a Roman collar, now claims ownership of the entire building, including the part of the building that houses the adjacent public school, “which belonged to the Church long before the war”. He assures that “all religions are accepted here, not only Croats”. The “themes of war” are not addressed there, by refusing to “overload the children”.
Influence of nationalist parties
“The big problem of this state is that we are raising young generations on the basis of divided educational systems and, as a result, we are sowing the seeds of future disagreements”, explains in Sarajevo Miro Lazović, who chairs the Council. constitutional reforms in Bosnia and Herzegovina aimed at integrating the country into the European Union. “Religious institutions are involved in educational structures. This complex system cannot be solved as long as these parties [ethno-nationalistes] who maintain these policies will remain in power. »
In the Serbian entity of the country, where the consequences of ethnic cleansing have been ratified by the peace agreements, the duty of memory does not pass through the school benches either. In the Republika Srpska (RS), the teaching of a single curriculum, modeled on that of Belgrade, is imposed not only on young Serbs, but on all minorities, who are often discriminated against. Mirolad Dodik, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, describes the Srebrenica massacre as a “myth” and firmly refutes the term genocide, which is recognized by international justice. In the history books of the Republika Srpska, there is no mention of this dark page of history, where 8,000 Bosnians were executed in July 1995 by Bosnian Serb forces.
“In the RS, some schools had been turned into detention camps during the conflict and today we don’t know what happened there. The children are brought up in such a way that they consider that their state is Serbia, that Bosnia is something temporary, lost between Dayton and the future. We continue to raise a whole generation that could tend towards separations [sociétales] even deeper than its elders,” laments Muamer Džananović, researcher at the Institute for Research on Crimes Against Humanity, affiliated with the University of Sarajevo.
In front of the public school in Travnik, faced with this decried regimentation, one feels above all indifference among the young people who confide in the To have to. “In my class, I don’t feel that we are separated, there are students of different religions. I heard about schools segmented on the division, I think it’s stupid…” drops Sumija, 15, who plans to become a nurse. A weariness like a part of Bosnian youth? In 2019, the iron fence that separated the common space between the two schools under the same Travnik roof was in any case dismantled…
With Ermina Aljicevic
This report was financed thanks to the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund.The duty.