The Ministry of Education of Canton Sarajevo (CS) is working on the revision of the teaching material for the study of the siege of Sarajevo and the crime of genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in the period from 1992 to 1995, which is intended for primary and secondary schools.
In May 2017, the Assembly of the CS passed a new Law on Primary Education and a new Law on Secondary Education, which predicted that the Ministry of Education, Science, and Youth of the CS would enable primary and secondary school students to more intensively study the siege of Sarajevo during the aggression from 1992 to 1995, and especially about the crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide committed in BiH during the same period.
The teaching material was compiled by a commission that was guided by primary historical and legal sources made available by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the competent international courts and courts of BiH that treated crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the population of Sarajevo.
This material and program, which was compiled in 2017, includes four teaching units, namely: Siege of Sarajevo, military-political aspect; The Siege of Sarajevo – everyday life and endangerment of humanitarian law; Ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in BiH from 1992 to 1995; and the Genocide in Srebrenica.
The goal is to improve the material and its content
The current convocation of the ministry, led by Minister Naida Hota-Muminovic, will start this year with the revision of the previously mentioned material, with the aim of improving it.
The reason, as the minister said, is that in the meantime there have been important court rulings that should be included in the plan and program.
“We started the revision of the teaching material because in the meantime we received additional important court rulings that should be included. It was important to include the historical threat that the convicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic uttered from the parliamentary lectern that ‘the Muslim people will disappear‘. After Hitler, you won’t find such a threat uttered in a parliament in modern history,” explains the minister.
As Hota-Muminovic adds, such a statement by Karadzic is proof that the genocide was planned and organized, which is something that students should be aware of.
“This shows that the genocide project was planned even then and it shows who was on which side of history. We want to improve the material and the technical aspects,” concludes the minister, Klix.ba reports.
E.Dz.
