Court decision may see controversial textbook banned from schools.
This fall, ninth-grade students in the Serb-majority entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina are studying a new topic in history class. In “Republika Srpska and the Defensive-Fatherland War,” they will learn about the war that devastated Bosnia in the early 1990s and its outcome. According to the entity’s vice-president, Camil Durakovic, the textbook commissioned for the new topic portrays the wartime leaders of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, as “heroes” of the war, while saying nothing about the crimes for which both are serving life sentences.
This two-page spread in the new textbook gives brief biographies of former Serbian Patriarch Pavle and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. Questions no. 3 and 4 in the box on the left-hand page ask about NATO’s “aggression” against Serbia and Republika Srpska.
Durakovic was one of the first in the entity to challenge the new textbook, calling on the Bosnian Prosecutor’s Office to intervene.
“The Prosecutor’s Office responded but stated it has no jurisdiction. The problem with the curriculum change is the indoctrination of an entire generation that is being taught to accept a forced narrative that Republika Srpska is a state and that Bosnia and Herzegovina is an impossible union,” Durakovic told Transitions.
The textbook “denies genocide and glorifies war criminals,” he said, while also presenting a narrative that relativizes institutions like the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina – a tribunal currently being boycotted by the Republika Srpska leadership. Students are taught that the court is “dominated by Bosniaks and foreigners who outvote the Serb justices,” he said, such as when it found the entity’s statehood holiday unconstitutional.
“This undermines the legitimacy of the state and its institutions while nationalizing the entity, presenting it as a state,” Durakovic said, speaking before the Constitutional Court’s recent decision that could see the textbook banned from classrooms.
Unconstitutional History?
The high court, acting on an appeal from members of the Bosnian parliament, suspended the parts of Republika Srpska’s official educational guidelines that allowed the use of the new textbook. In theory, the textbook should now be withdrawn from classrooms, because, the court said, implementation of the disputed parts of the guidelines “would have serious and irremediable, detrimental consequences reflected in a potential risk of further segregation and division among pupils of different ethnic communities and an increased feeling of exclusion and marginalization of pupils from other ethnic communities, which could possibly create an atmosphere of discrimination.”
The textbook, authored by University of Banja Luka history professor Dragisa Vasic, describes Karadzic, the wartime president of Republika Srpska, as a psychiatrist, poet, and politician. “As the founder and leader of the SDS [Serbian Democratic Party, still the entity’s ruling party], he played a significant role in creating Republika Srpska, where he served as the first president. In 2008, Serbian authorities extradited him to the Hague Tribunal, which sentenced him to life imprisonment in 2019,” the entry on Karadzic reads in its entirety.
Alija Izetbegovic, the leading Bosniak politician before, during, and after the Yugoslav wars, is described as a lawyer, Islamic theologian, and politician. The textbook also states that “In his youth, he was active in the pro-Hitler organization ‘Young Muslims,’ for which he was imprisoned after World War II,” going on to note that the communist authorities, much later, sentenced Izetbegovic to another prison term for advocating for an Islamic state.
Another page in the textbook section on the Bosnian War with biographies of Ratko Mladic and Alija Izetbegovic. The book skirts the details of the Hague Tribunal’s verdict against Karadzic, which found him guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws and customs of war. The same international tribunal likewise sentenced Mladic, the military commander of Bosnian Serb forces in the 1990s, to life imprisonment for war crimes.
Once the Bosnian War ended in 1995, the text states, Croats struggled for equality with Bosniaks, while Bosniaks sought centralization and a unitary state, pushing Republika Srpska closer to Serbia. The international community, represented by the European Union and the United States, is portrayed in the textbook as supporting only the Bosniaks.
Western Partners Chime In
The international institutions that loom large in Bosnia’s internal affairs and future prospects were quick to decry the new textbook soon after the new school year began. The changes in the history curriculum in RS display an unhelpful politicization of education and hinder the aim of teaching “a common and accurate approach to the elusive history of the 1990s,” the EU delegation in Bosnia told Radiosarajevo.ba, referring also to the European Commission’s admonition to “Take concrete steps to promote an environment conducive to reconciliation, in order to overcome the legacy of war” if the country wishes to end its long wait to start the EU accession process.
The Office of the High Representative (OHR) – a supervisory body that has not hesitated to use its sweeping powers in the past – stated that the continued domination of ethnocentric perspectives in history textbooks helps keep alive distorted truths about war crimes committed during the 1990s and the individuals responsible for those crimes.
While the OHR emphasizes that quality education must include European values such as tolerance, Bosniak and Croat children in Republika Srpska have no other alternative – they must study from the same ninth-grade textbook as the majority Serb peers.
“I know what I would do with my children,” RS Vice President Durakovic said. “What’s the recommendation? I wouldn’t send my children to study distorted history. This is an imposition, indoctrination, and the forced promotion of a false narrative through the education system. … Primary education is legally mandatory. This is a hopeless situation affecting the most vulnerable group in the country – returnees and their children.”
Will RS Obey the High Court?
Constitutional law professor and legal expert Nurko Pobric, also speaking before the recent Constitutional Court ruling, said he expected that the court would ultimately rule the new history curriculum unconstitutional but was also concerned whether the RS authorities would respect its rulings. In that event, students in the entity would still have ways to show their unhappiness with the new textbook, he said.
“I wouldn’t say that Bosniak children are completely forced to study such history. They can ignore it, stop attending those lessons. We have a certain kind of civil disobedience here. Of course, it’s not good that Constitutional Court decisions are ignored,” Pobric said, noting also the entity’s refusal to appoint its allotted two justices to the Constitutional Court until a dispute with Bosniak lawmakers over the court’s composition is resolved.
At the time of writing, the Ministry of Education and Culture of Republika Srpska had not responded to questions about the new curriculum. Early last month the ministry responded to the initial criticisms, noting that the Bosnian conflict is not a new topic in ninth-grade history lessons.
“Figures like Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, as well as others, are individuals who held significant roles in the military and political life of Republika Srpska during the studied period, so they cannot be omitted when presenting events related to the creation of Republika Srpska and the Defensive-Fatherland War,” the ministry announced.
Historian Borivoje Milosevic took a similar line, telling public broadcaster RTRS that the new material on Karadzic and Mladic is based in fact.
“Regardless of what opinion someone had about certain personalities, if it is about someone who created the past and was an actor of important historical events, it is quite logical that their name should be found in the subject headings,” he said.
Some in the entity have different views. Robert Dacesin, a world traveler from the RS capital of Banja Luka, said the local ATV broadcaster stopped streaming his travel shows after his Instagram post saying, “Karadzic and Mladic are mentioned as heroes, Alija [Izetbegovic] is described as pro-Hitler, and there’s no mention of Srebrenica. Let’s be clear, I fully understand why such a narrative is being created, but I think the 8,000+ victims in Srebrenica deserve at least a mention, if nothing else.”
ATV is close to RS President Milorad Dodik and was sanctioned along with Dodik by the U.S. Treasury in 2022.
Relatives and custodians of the memory of the mostly Bosniak men and boys murdered at Srebrenica in 1995 also took stances against the textbook.
The Movement of Mothers of Srebrenica and Zepa Enclaves said it expected the OHR and the Bosnian Prosecutor’s Office to adequately respond, arguing that the new curriculum violates the 1995 Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian War.
Members of the board of directors of the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial Center and Cemetery for the victims of the 1995 genocide issued a statement saying that the changes to the Republika Srpska history curriculum will allow the spread of disinformation and hatred among younger generations and the continued glorification of convicted war criminals.
Glimmer of Hope in Court Dispute
“There’s a lot of unfairness in the society we live in, shaped by others, but I hope the day will come when we all learn from the same books and the same history,” Dacesin wrote.
The country’s Constitutional Court may have the final say on that, but that in turn depends largely on the attitude of increasingly secessionist RS leaders. The nine-member tribunal comprises four justices nominated by the Federation entity parliament, two by the RS parliament, and three foreign nationals appointed by the European Court of Human Rights (one German, one Swiss, and one Albanian at present). But RS lawmakers oppose filling the vacant positions for the region’s two judges until the national parliament passes a law to divide the court along ethnic lines and bar foreign nationals from serving.
Bosniak members of the national parliament had been boycotting sessions for months in protest over the bill introduced by Serb parliamentarian Zelimir Neskovic. Then, on 15 October, Neskovic withdrew the bill, explaining that he no longer wished to supply a justification for the Bosniak boycott and urging Serb, Bosniak, and Croat lawmakers to find “joint solutions” and not sweep divisive issues under the carpet.
For now, however, ninth-graders in Republika Srpska will be taught a different interpretation of the 1990s wars than their peers in other parts of the country, because in June the entity legislature declared Constitutional Court rulings invalid in the region, meaning that the court’s ruling suspending the use of the new textbook is unlikely to be implemented any time soon.
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Edina Secerovic, a Sarajevo-based journalist for 18 years, has edited, produced, and hosted news programs for Federalna TV in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, TVSA in Sarajevo Canton, regional broadcaster Una TV, and for Face TV based in Sarajevo. Secerovic is a research analyst and contributor at media.ba, specializing in media freedom, hate speech, disinformation, European integration, and politics.