Bosnian Serb Schoolbooks to Teach Same War History as Serbia
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Republika Srpska is ready to introduce new history textbooks for high school pupils which will include the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as part of an ongoing project to unify school curriculums with Serbia, the entity’s education ministry told BIRN.
“In elementary schools in Republika Srpska from September 2018, a new textbook for the ninth grade was introduced and from the next school year, 2019-20, a new textbook for third- and fourth-grade grammar schools will be in use in which the topic of the civil war in Bosnia will be one of the themes,” the Republika Srpska ministry told BIRN in a written statement.
The previous history textbooks in Republika Srpska only included a few general facts about the war.
The ministry also said that the Pedagogical Institutes of Serbia and Republika Srpska are working on the harmonisation of content for the so-called ‘national’ set of subjects in the curriculum – language, history, geography and knowledge of nature and society.
‘National’ subjects are taught differently in Bosnian schools according to pupils’ ethnicity, depending on whether they are Bosniak, Croat or Serb.
The OSCE mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina said it welcomes regional co-operation as a way of furthering reconciliation and mutual understanding, but warned that the reform of history teaching is a long, sensitive and complicated process in post-conflict societies.
“Including content related to the events between 1992 and 1995 is an important issue for responsible education authorities to address, but it must be done in an inclusive and unbiased manner,” ambassador Bruce G. Berton, the head of the OSCE mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina, told BIRN in a written statement.
Berton noted that the Guidelines for Writing and Evaluation of History Textbooks for Primary and Secondary Schools in Bosnia, adopted by all the country’s ministries of education, say that authors of textbooks should decrease the amount of information relating to political history, and that textbooks should be objective, scientifically based and aimed at building mutual understanding, reconciliation and peace in the country.
“This also means textbooks should include different historical sources on particular events in order to foster dialogue and build tolerance,” Berton said.
Sarajevo-based political analyst Zlatiborka Popov Momcinovic told BIRN that it is crucial that all lessons as well as textbooks are well balanced and based on fact.
“We, as a post-conflict society, need teachers who will not interpret any facts within a certain political framework, so they [teachers] must be fully aware of that during the educational process,” Popov Momcinovic said.
“The educational system, especially in Bosnia and neighbouring Serbia or Croatia, must be free of ideology, and that is what concerns the most in this case,” she added.
The Republika Srpska Pedagogical Institute has argued that the Serbian and Republika Srpska schoolbooks are already similar and that only a part of their content needs to be amended.
“We do not intend to hurt anyone by taking into account the protection of the identity of the Serbian people. We do not object to others doing the same. Since 2002, Bosniak students in Republika Srpska have had a national group of subjects, as well as students of Croat nationality [ethnicity],” Predrag Damjanovic, the director of the institute, told media in 2018 when the plan was introduced.
