Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina is an emerging democracy governed by a complex array of structures at the State, Entity, and Cantonal levels. The basis for the educational structures at the State level, in each of the two Entities, and in the ten Cantons of the Federation is laid out in the Constitution prepared as part of the 1995 Dayton Accords. In addition to the governing organs whose members are selected and elected by Bosnians, the post-war government of BiH includes the non-Bosnian Office of the High Representative, designed to oversee the implementation of the Dayton Accords and to monitor progress toward ethnic reintegration and the just and peaceful resettlement of Bosnia's large population of refugees and internally displaced people. Whereas a sizable UN peacekeeping force was deployed throughout Bosnia after the war to ensure the country's stability and to prevent a return to ethnic violence, by the late 1990s a Stabilization Force (SFOR) led by NATO was in place in the country to implement the military side of the Dayton Accords and to protect the security of civilians as the country moved toward reconstruction and rehabilitation. In addition, an International Police Task Force (IPTF) was established by the United Nations in an Annex to the Dayton Accords to monitor local police and provide them with training and advice as well as to investigate alleged abuses of human rights. Human rights conditions in the country remained difficult in the late 1990s; as of 2001 security forces in the country—including the regular police, "special" or secret police, and the armies maintained by the two Entities—continued to provoke complaints from Bosnians of human rights abuses, largely involving police brutality.

A very helpful chart depicting the complex layout of BiH's principal governing structures at the national level and the Entity levels is provided by the Bosnian Embassy on their website (http://www.bosnianembassy.org/). As the chart graphically shows, the Bosnian people elect the three member rotating Presidency (consisting of one Bosniac, one Serb, and one Croat, where the President rotates every eight months) to a four year term. In turn, the Presidency appoints the members of the Council of Ministers for BiH, who are approved by the national, 42 member House of Representatives and who report to the national, 15 member House of People, the second national level legislative chamber (consisting of 5 Bosniacs, 5 Serbs, and 5 Croats elected for 2 year terms).

The voters of the Federation directly elect 28 members of the national House of Representatives (who serve 2 year terms) as well as the 140 members of the Federation's own House of Representatives (who also serve for 2 years). The Federation's House of Representatives and the Federation's House of Nations (consisting of 30 Bosniacs, 30 Croats, and 14 others) constitute the 2 chambers of the Federation's legislature. The Federation has its own Presidency for the Entity, a two member Presidency consisting of one Bosniac and one Croat elected for a two year term and rotating between President and Vice President every six months.

The Serbian Republic has its own unicameral legislature, the RS National Assembly, consisting of 83 members elected for 2 year terms by the voters of the RS. The members of this Assembly elect the RS's members of the national House of Representatives and also select the RS members for the national House of People. The RS has its own Entity President, one person elected for a two year term.

In addition to the executive and legislative branches of government, BiH has a judicial branch consisting of a Constitutional Court of nine members, four of them selected by the Federation's House of Representatives, two by the RS's National Assembly, and three non-Bosnians selected by the president of the European Court of Human Rights. The judiciary at the national level is supplemented by judicial organs in each of the Entities as well as by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, leading at times to confusion by Bosnian authorities as to which rules apply to which situations in terms of arrests and detention. According to the U.S. Department of State in early 2001, the judiciary in both the RS and the Federation was unduly influenced by the dominant political parties and by the executive branch. In addition to rather widespread problems of discrimination against women and violence against them, especially domestic violence, minorities were often subject to severe discrimination in Serb and Croat majority areas and to a lesser extent in Bosniac majority areas. This was especially the case for refugees and the internally displaced, many of whom had not yet returned to their home communities or who had returned to areas now controlled by a different ethnic group than lived there in pre-war days. Job discrimination and discrimination in education have plagued many people in BiH since the war and are not likely to be fully addressed until better arrangements are made by the nationalist parties in power to ensure the fair distribution of employment and education benefits to all people living in Bosnia—including those who belong to none of the three major ethnic groups.

Although Bosnia has made some progress in rebuilding schools and beginning education reforms since the war ended, progress has been slowed by the conflicts and contradictions existing between the two parallel education systems of RS and FBH; by the presence of ten separate educational systems across the Federation's ten Cantons; by the clashing co-existence of pre-war and more recent educational laws, teaching methods, and curricula; and perhaps most significantly, by the presence and resistance of ethnic nationalist individuals and political parties among the Serbs, Croats, and Bosniacs who wish to impose their own particularistic interpretations of history and of the war on their communities and the curricula in their schools. Especially problematic in terms of subject matter has been the teaching of recent history, notably the war period of the 1990s. Certain international organizations and experts have called for a moratorium on the teaching of the history of this period in the country until a combination of international historians and local experts can thoroughly revise the history texts and curricula used in Bosnian schools so that teaching is accurate and can impartially reflect what transpired before and during the war years. However, this recommendation for a moratorium has been met with heavy protests and resistance from ethnic nationalists interested in preserving their own interpretations of Bosnian history and warrelated events and promulgating their biased views in Bosnia's schools.

In 2001 international education specialists and Bosnian educators, government officials, and pedagogical researchers continued to work collaboratively to revise offensive textbooks throughout Bosnia and to remove passages of inaccurate, inflammatory, and/or nationalist writing from the books and curricula used in schools. Rewriting texts and removing objectionable material from the teaching curricula was begun in August 1999 after the three education ministers in the country—the Minister and Deputy Minister of Education for the Federation and the Minister of Education for the RS—responded to international pressure and finally signed an agreement concerning the excision of objectionable passages and the identification of other passages as debatable. Based on an agreement made by the Minister of Education in May 2000, this work was to be completed by the end of June 2000 with substantial improvements in the quality of textbooks made by the end of the year 2000.

At the turn of the millennium, the focus of educational reforms in Bosnia and Herzegovina was on rebuilding schools, retraining teachers, improving the curriculum, reducing the number of subjects taught in the schools so as to increase educational quality and efficiency, and developing more functional vocational education systems at both secondary and higher levels of instruction, including at the level of adult education, so that workers with employable skills could be trained for the newly reviving Bosnian economy. In general, a major emphasis of educational reform work was being placed on unifying the school systems operating in the country and dismantling the often conflicting parallel systems that had developed between the two Entities and across the ten Cantons. The duplication and mismatching of educational programs and schools in the separately developed systems around Bosnia and Herzegovina were making the return and reintegration of refugees and internally displaced Bosnians especially problematic. Since the languages and subjects taught in one part of the country were not matched by those taught in other places, students seeking to transfer from one community and educational system to another often experienced rejection and/or confusion. Furthermore, since examinations, diplomas, and credentials were not uniformly established or awarded across the various educational systems, problems often have arisen for graduates seeking to work in another part of the country from where the original exams had been taken or diplomas and credentials had been awarded. In the year 2000 the RS developed three new laws concerning education in primary and secondary schools and at higher levels of education. A new strategy for vocational education in the RS had been defined and adopted by the Entity government in 1999. In turn, FBH had ten different laws pertaining to vocational education in secondary schools, one for each of its ten cantons. Major reforms were being planned by the World Bank and other international partners of Bosnian education officials through their collaborative work with Bosnian teachers and administrators by early 2001, when special efforts began to address in earnest the problem of harmonizing the various conflicting educational systems and the problems of ethnic segregation and discrimination that appeared to be widespread. Roma and Jews were especially marginalized in the education systems that had developed after the war.