While politicians harmonize policies, negative natural growth and emigration from Bosnia and Herzegovina leads to a population loss of one and a half percent every year, according to UN estimates. There are more and more elderly people, and fewer and fewer newborns. Only one baby was born in Bosanski Grahovo last year.
The day will come when the school bell in Bosanski Grahovo will be replaced by noise and silence, say the locals. Only four first-graders were enrolled in the first grade, and only one baby was born last year. Against 29 deaths. A better life in this municipality has been waiting for a long time. Young people have to go miles away in order to achieve the basic needs of life.
“Every day more and more people are dying, the city is dying. Young people have no perspective. They have to go for work, for bread. What can I tell you…”, Dobrila Kudra, a resident of Bosanski Grahovo, tells BHRT.
From the pre-war population of 9,000, only about a thousand inhabitants live in Bosanski Grahovo today. Houses are not restored, there is no return. Numerous ruins are a constant decoration along the streets that are ghostly and deserted anyway.
“Life is very difficult, without some jobs, companies that will employ especially those young people. No bank, no health center with an ambulance. I don’t know what to tell you. It’s really difficult to live here today,” says the mayor of Bosansko Grahovo Municipality, Uroš Đuran.
Last year, in the first ten months, 15,835 babies were born in the Federation, and 19,943 people died. In Republika Srpska, that number is slightly lower.
When the emigration of young people is added to that – statistics show that the country loses an entire city in just one year. White plague is an almost permanent condition.
“Subsidies for private kindergartens, free school transport, subsidies for the first residential property – these are all demographic measures that are within our competence and we can adopt them, but the city cannot solve demography by itself, it is the strategy of the state, the canton”, emphasizes the mayor of Livno, Darko Čondrić.
Canton 10, which is spatially and the largest in the Federation, did not increase the child allowance as of 2018. That omission was corrected to some extent by the fact that during the adoption of this year’s budget, an amendment worth 1,400,000 BAM was provided, according to which the allowance is increased from 30 to 50 BAM per child.
“Bosansko Grahovo Municipality made a decision 10-12 years ago on the incentive for a newborn child, which is 500 BAM. Last year, one child was born, the year before last, five. Few children are born, there are few young people,” says Đuran.
Although in Bosansko Grahovo they try to help young families with cash allowances for newborn children, this municipality, like many others in Bosnia and Herzegovina, is not doing well. There is no work, young people are leaving, and some parts look as if the war has just stopped.
