War Studies Website Launched for Balkan Teachers
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net, a website developed with historians from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia, is intended to help educators teach about the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia and promote reconciliation.
The Association of European Educators of History, EUROCLIO, in cooperation with associations of history teachers and educators from the former Yugoslav region, has launched a new website containing materials intended to help teach subjects related to the 1990s wars.
The Devedesete.net website is the result of a two-year project entitled ‘Learning History That is Not Yet History’.
“This is a period that is remembered in different and often very contradictory and mutually exclusive ways,” the site says.
The history of the 1990s wars is a sensitive issue in all the former Yugoslav countries, and while wartime topics are addressed in lessons in some of the countries, they are only partially addressed or not covered at all in others, the site adds.
“Croats still live in the 1990s, Serbs pretend that the 1990s did not happen at all, while the most chaotic situation exists in Bosnia and Herzegovina due to a large number of curricula and syllabuses,” said Aleksandar Todosijevic of the Association for Social History of Serbia EUROCLIO, who was involved in the design of the webpage.
“Our idea was to show to teachers there are materials beyond the curriculum that can be used when teaching about the 1990 wars in a modern and responsible manner. Those include various databases, literature, documentaries and feature films, museum exhibitions, memorials, as well as various NGO projects,” Todosijevic added.
The materials also include Hague Tribunal verdicts and two documentaries produced by BIRN in Bosnia and Herzegovina – ‘Missing You’, about the relatives of missing persons, and ‘Silent Scream’ about the traumas still experienced by wartime sexual abuse victims in Bosnia.
Todosijevic said that by using the materials on the site, educators will teach children about reconciliation.
“In public, people still talk about ‘their’ victims, each side thinks they suffered the most. If we teach children in that way, it will cause anger or some sort of hatred among children, which would be a perfect ground for new conflicts,” he explained.
