Children from Konjevć Polje and other returnees in the municipalities of Zvornik, Milići and Bratunac also started school today. They attend classes in an improvised facility in Nova Kasaba in order to exercise the right to study the national group of subjects and the Bosnian language, which is denied to them in schools in the Republika Srpska. The struggle of parents to have their children learn Bosnian, and not the Bosniak language, has been going on for a full ten years. Everyone forgot them, including the government institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also the International Community, which never reacted due to the denial of children’s right to adequate education.
Džemil Mustafić, a returnee to the village of Rašljeva, has three children. He is one of the many returnee parents who fought in front of the OHR building in 2013 for their children to have the right to the Bosnian language. Neither the BiH authorities nor the International Community have ever helped them to exercise their right in schools, so they were forced to enroll their children in Nova Kasaba, where in this improvised facility, for ten years, children have been attending classes according to the plan and program of the Canton of Sarajevo.
DŽEMIL MUSTAFIĆ, parent
“I care. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t have taken my children 13 kilometers here, the school below me is five kilometers away. I fought for the Bosnian language, not for my child to learn the Serbian language. To my credit, I respect theirs, but let them respect mine as well. I want to have my right here and I should have it as a citizen”.
Aid Muminović has four children, and because his children go to school here in Nova Kasaba, he waives the child allowance in the amount of 750 BAM every month in order for his children to learn the Bosnian language. As a returnee, he was also denied other rights. His son, as a child with developmental difficulties, failed to realize his right to regular education in Drinjača, and here in the new Kasaba, the teachers immediately accepted him and he has been there for eight years.
AID MUMINOVIĆ, parent
“One child of Serbian nationality from Kamenica also suffers from these problems. I can do it like him, mine can’t. I didn’t even ask for further school. So you also had to give up these 750 marks just because your children go to school here.”
And indeed, almost thirty years after the war, politics is still playing with the lives of these people and their children. And although they returned to their country more than twenty years ago, they are still considered returnees whose rights are decided far from here. For ten years, both the BiH authorities and the International Community have allowed children to attend classes in this improvised educational center.
ADIS MEHIĆ, parent
“There is an insufficient number of classrooms here, there is no hall, there is simply no field, there is a main road next to it. Children are exposed to dangers. But it is simply that someone is denying me the right to learn which language I will learn. So, if I can learn Russian and English, without I can do my own. That’s what this policy imposed, how can I tell you. National, which does not lead the entire nation or the entire society in any direction. So it harms the entire society”.
Instead of today being the happiest day of the year for children and parents, this day for many is full of uncertainty for their tomorrow. They denied them the right to their mother tongue, and then also their material rights. What rights should children remain without, in order for the huge non-governmental sector and institutions with the prefix of human rights protection to take care of students and young returnee families in Zvornik, Milići, Bratunac, Srebrenica, but also in other places in Republika Srpska that suffer from the same problem, BHRT writes.
