Although the population census of Bosnia and Herzegovina should have been redone, it is not being talked about in our country at all. The question is what the data would show, because every year one city disappears in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and according to United Nations estimates, by 2070, Bosnia and Herzegovina will lose half of its population.
Villages that were once full of inhabitants are now literally empty. And many cities remain more and more lonely, especially those of returnees. Bosnia and Herzegovina is facing a huge population outflow, and the natural increase is also negative. For example, in the Tuzla Canton there were more people born during the war than there are today. Even one of the main actors in policy-making in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dragan Čović, admits that the demographic picture of BiH is very bad.
“If you ask me how many inhabitants there are, I will tell you that Bosnia and Herzegovina does not have more than two million inhabitants. Now, if in the last population census in 2013, ten years ago, we had the number of inhabitants we had, and I just mentioned some figure based on the data I have and they are speculation, because we did not conduct a population census like the rest of the normal world, two years ago. That says enough that we should all be worried in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Covic said.
Emigration accounts for seventy percent of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s demographic problem, which is best shown by school data. For example, there are even fifty percent fewer students in the Posavina Canton today than nine years ago.
“At the level of the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina, there are 33 percent fewer students in secondary schools, thirty percent in elementary schools, and the same is true at the level of higher education. Such a population decline has not occurred anywhere in the world in a period of nine years. So, nowhere in the world the loss of a third of all students has not occurred in nine years,” says Tado Juric, an UN expert on demography in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
And whether they will stay or leave Bosnia and Herzegovina depends mostly on a policy that should be safe and in which parents will not be forced to raise their children in an environment of social divisions and unrest. Quite the opposite, in the environment of economic development, dialogue, peace and happy upbringing. All this is in the hands of those who create policies in the parliamentary benches.
“We have a significant drop in the birth rate, in 1991 there were 75,000 children born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, now it is below 25,000. So, our young population is leaving. We must create a positive atmosphere, so that it stays, so that mothers give birth to more than one child, rather than deciding for a larger number of children,” explains Amra Nadarevic, representative in the Assembly of Tuzla Canton.
“Mothers and women are in an ungrateful position on the labor market. They very often lose their jobs, precisely because they want to become mothers or give birth to two or three children. And that is in complete contrast to what we want in BiH, we want to increase birth rate, we want to have more children born. Statistics show that we have more deaths than births and that needs to be changed.”
When it comes to the demographic picture, in Bosnia and Herzegovina it is no longer 5 to 12, but 12 and 5, and if the government continues to behave like this towards emigration and the decline in the birth rate, we will be remembered as a generation that did not care about its future.
