Bosnia and Herzegovina

In March 2000 the Council of Europe's Committee on Culture and Education recommended that the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe do the following to improve education in Bosnian schools: 1) provide funding for the Council to continue to offer key support to the education sector in BiH, 2) work with the High Representative and international organizations operating in BiH to reinterpret the Dayton Accords so education planning, implementation, and management responsibilities will be better distributed at the Canton, Entity, and State levels; 3) coordinate the work of the Council and other international organizations to link international funding with Bosnian compliance with prior conditions set by international donors concerning such issues as textbook improvements, ethnic desegregation, coordination, and language policies; 4) continue to encourage a moratorium on teaching about the 1990s war so that historians from all of BiH's ethnic communities can work together with international experts to develop a commonly agreed-upon approach to teaching recent history; 5) provide moral and material support for local educational initiatives, especially those that counteract ethnic segregation; 6) continue to support multiethnic pilot projects in education and consider expanding these in places where the greatest impact may be had, such as Brcko and Mostar; 7) make sure that all ethnic communities, including minorities besides the three major ethnic groups, can exercise their rights to education via a multiethnic perspective; 8) suggest administrative, financial, and legislative solutions to establish a cost-effective system of higher education capable of meeting current and future needs; and 9) "consider using distance learning to overcome ethnic segregation at university level."

As the international community progressively disengages itself from providing funding and technical assistance to Bosnia and Herzegovina in the coming years, and once the country becomes more economically secure and has overcome the fragmentation it suffered during the recent years of violent ethnic conflict, it is hoped that educational authorities will be able to envision a future for the children and youth of their country that includes multiethnic cooperation and the protection of human rights, regardless of the ethnic group to which a person belongs. To this end, the views of the Council of Europe's Committee on Culture and Education on the complexity and significance of educational reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina, expressed in their March 2000 report to the Council, come to mind: "Achieving the transition to a more integrated education system—or at least the more effective co-ordination of parallel systems—is an immensely difficult task which necessitates complex planning in stages and the restoration of confidence between the different communities. In the present post-war context, where most of the country's regions continue to be divided along ethnic lines, few issues can have a higher priority."