POLITICS-SERBIA&MONTENEGRO: Young Find Hope in a Fractured Nation

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Mar 11 2003 (IPS) - After a decade of repression, years of sanctions, weeks of bombing and the break-up of a nation, the young in Serbia are finding a new optimism.

The young think that life in Serbia is not bad and that it get better, a survey among a sample of 1600 youngsters aged 15-25 shows.

Hope has risen even though Serbia has not quite recovered from the decade of rule of former president Slobodan Milosevic. Serbia was among the most developed places in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the nineties. Then came the wars that left 200,000 dead, the economic isolation and the breakdown of Serbian economy.

Serbia is still on a slow and painful road of recovery as it takes the shocks of privatisation, the bankruptcies of huge state-owned systems that had been kept going on life support systems, and high unemployment. Many Serbs are disappointed with the reforms, because they have brought no quick comeback to pre-Milosevic living standards.

But about half the young still see the future as good or bright. The poll showed 37 per cent of youths describing their future as good, 12 per cent as bright, 17 per cent as average, and only 6 per cent as bad. In all 28 per cent said they do not think about it – which may not be a bad thing.

The study was carried out by the Serbian Education Ministry, the Belgrade Centre for Alternative Studies and the Proni Institute for Social Education in Sweden.

Half the young would still emigrate if their plans for better future fail, says sociologist Srecko Mihailovic, co-author of the study. ”This is, of course, less than a decade ago, when two-thirds of youngsters said they want to emigrate because of poverty and wars in their neighbourhood,” Mihailovic says. More than 350,000 young people left Serbia in the early nineties.

”It’s also important to note that political motives for emigration are mentioned by only one per cent of youngsters, but the current administration should be worried with these figures too,” he says. ”Youngsters now say they want highly paid jobs and a nice lifestyle.”

Also, a different lifestyle from their parents. ”Youngsters want jobs in management, private business, tourism and journalism,” Mihailovic says. ”They see little attraction in the professions highly respected by their parents – physicians, lawyers, teachers or scientists. Oddly, some 41 per cent say they have no idol or model person.”

Dragan Popadic, another co-author of the study and psychology teacher at Belgrade University says what has not changed is a belief in family life. No matter how bad the Milosevic decade, young people were able to find comfort and support in their families.

”That was the major gain for our youth then, and now too they say a good and healthy family should be the centre of their life in the future,” Popadic says.

It was not just family connections but also a harsh economic situation that led a high number of youngsters to live with their parents even after they found jobs. Only nine per cent of young working men and 14 per cent of young working women live on their own.

The study has shows that only eight per cent of under-25s are married. Most of the youngsters surveyed said they would not marry and have children before they are 30.

”I would not call the results neither optimistic nor pessimistic, they just show the reality,” Popadic told IPS. ”One must bear in mind that there was only one small study on youth earlier (in 1985) and its results were profoundly pessimistic.”

One remarkable difference between the 1985 and the 2003 studies is that ”while in 1985 only 5.3 per cent of youngsters said they were religious, this study showed that only 8.3 per cent are not,” Popadic says.

”But that can be a result of a decade of isolation, brainwashing by the Milosevic media or conservative nationalist circles on the importance of being Serb and of Orthodox religion…one must really understand the extremely peculiar circumstances these youngsters grew up in to understand how they think. Still, they turned up better than anyone could have expected.”