While she was untying her shoelaces in front of the family’s house in the Sirokaca neighbourhood of Sarajevo, the three-year-old was injured by a sniper’s bullet. Pita was standing a metre away from Anisa when she screamed and fell down. 

“I thought she was dead,” Pita said.

Pita fainted from shock and later, in hospital, had to listen to her daughter cry while being operated upon without anesthetic because by that time, several months after the start of the war and the siege of Sarajevo, there was a shortage of medical supplies in the city. 

Her daughter survived and now lives in Canada. Pita testified about what happened to little Anisa that day at three trials at the Hague Tribunal which involved charges related to the siege of Sarajevo. 

As a result, the sniper incident in which her daughter was injured has become a judicially established fact. Now she hopes that the story of civilians in Sarajevo were targeted by snipers during the war will work its way into domestic history textbooks. 

“If it’s not included in the textbooks, it will be forgotten in a little while. Future generations and children will not know,” she said. 

Judicially determined facts about the war are still seldom studied in Bosnain schools nearly three decades after it ended. 

“When my daughter was attending elementary and secondary school, there was nothing in the textbooks. She learned from us, because we used to tell her about it, and from pictures,” Pita explained.

The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina remains a taboo topic in the domestic education system, and according to experts’ analysis, children can only find meagre information in textbooks about what happened, presented from a one-sided point of view, which further entrenches ethnic divisions in society. 

This is a result of a moratorium proposed by the Council of Europe to temporarily suspend the study of the war in schools, said Nenad Velickovic, editor of education magazine Skolegijum. The moratorium, adopted in 2000, was intended to “enable historians from all communities… to develop a common approach”, according to the Council of Europe.

It ended in 2019 and since then, some information about the war period has been introduced into textbooks, but using sources that are unclear and teaching materials that haven’t been updated for contemporary methods.

“The reasons for them making it into textbooks was not an honest desire by educational and political decision-makers to actually inform students about what happened in an objective and fair manner, but to use the war as material for their national [ethnic] narratives on each of the sides,” Velickovic said.

Making matters more complicated is that there is no state-level direction over the content of school textbooks. Instead it is decided by the country’s two entities, the Federation and Republika Srpska, and by the ten cantons in the Federation entity. 

Education influenced by politics 

The current textbooks do not properly explain what happened during the war, said Snjezana Melunovic, a history teacher at Gymnasium Obala in Sarajevo. 

“Actually they mention facts associated with the break-up of Yugoslavia, and then there is an intermezzo, a break, followed by a discussion of the Dayton [peace] agreement and the end of the war, so they actually make no mention of the war itself,” Melunovic said. 

In the city of Gorazde, children learn hardly anything about the war from outdated history textbooks, said Admir Kurtovic, director of the Pedagogical Institute of Bosnian-Podrinje Canton. 

“History textbooks do not generally mention [the war], except for a sentence or two, but there are no concrete details and particulars,” explained Kurtovic.

There are three different educational systems in Bosnia and Herzegovina – Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. All three systems have different learning methods and curricula, particularly on sensitive issues. As a consequence, their textbooks also differ.

Melisa Foric Plasto, a professor at the history department of the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, said that when the three ethnically-based educational systems started to introduce wartime history into their textbooks, they did so in different ways.

“What characterises the approach is actually a focus on national [ethnic] history, or the history and [war] victims from one people [ethnic group] only, and the selective presentation of facts,” Foric Plasto said, adding that some of the Hague Tribunal’s war crimes verdicts are not mentioned at all in the new textbooks. 

For example, a new textbook that has been in use in the Tuzla Canton since last year uses neither domestic nor international court verdicts as its source, but instead cites a book entitled The Army, The Key to Peace by former Bosnian Army general Rasim Delic, who was sentenced to three years in prison by the Hague Tribunal for failing to take steps to prevent or punish crimes committed by foreign Islamic fighters known as the Mujahideen against Serb prisoners in the Zavidovici area. 

School students in Zenica learn about judicially established facts about the Srebrenica genocide, but apart from that, details about what happened during the war between 1992 and 1995 are meagre and do not offer the correct, said Mirza Cehajic, an adviser for education at the Pedagogical Institute of Zenica-Doboj Canton. 

There is no teaching about court verdicts for crimes that happened in places in the Zenica-Doboj Canton itself, Cehajic added. 

“The events at the Music School in Zenica [where prisoners were detained and assaulted] in 1993 and in Vozuca near Zavidovici [where prisoners were killed] in 1995 are not included in textbooks that are used in the Zenica-Doboj Canton,” she explained. 

A new teaching tool

In the past few years, children in Sarajevo have learned about the siege of the city and Srebrenica genocide from material that cites the relevant court verdicts. But teachers in the capital and elsewhere still lack sufficient material from reliable sources that they can use to teach about the war. 

In order to change that, over the past two years, BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina has sifted through thousands of pages of Hague Tribunal verdicts and spoken to witnesses to war crimes across the country to create a database of judicially established facts (in Bosnian). 

The database is divided into ten regions, each of which includes a half-hour documentary with personal testimonials from survivors of crimes as well as the relevant facts from the verdicts. As well as the database, professor Foric Plasto put together teaching materials materials to help educators use the new resource in the classroom. 

BIRN journalist Haris Rovcanin, who did the research for the database, said it is intended to help children to learn in school about what has been established judicially about wartime crimes, not in the way that the various parties to conflict interpret the facts, taking from verdicts what suits them and denying other parts that might show them in a bad light. 

“The database is important due to the fact that in recent years and even recent decades, we have often witnessed the relativisation of history, revisionism and the alteration of judicially determined facts,” Rovcanin said.

Andrea Soldo, a social researcher who has analysed the history curriculum in Bosnia and Herzegovina, believes that judicially determined facts about the war are very welcome as an additional source of information and a resource that can be used in history classes from elementary schools to universities. 

“History classes can take a prominent place and play an important role in the process of reconciliation and peace-building and those broader transitional justice processes. But without a consensus in our society and an acceptance and understanding of why this is important for us, I am afraid that no serious progress will happen,” Soldo said. 

Any final decision to use judicially established facts in history teaching will ultimately have to be approved by ministries of education in the two entities and the Federation’s ten cantons. This means that these decisions lie with politicians who may have their own ethnic agendas.

However, some teachers who grasped the potential of the database while it was being developed have already invited BIRN journalists to speak in classes. Several months before the launch of the database, training courses for more than 50 teachers on how to use the new resource were organised in Sarajevo, Tuzla and Mostar.

Foric Plasto said the database will be useful for her history students at Sarajevo University’s Faculty of Philosophy.

“All these young people are future school teachers,” she pointed out. “I expect that they will have the chance to transfer the skills they will develop here to their working environment when working with future students, and that could represent some hope for the future.”