EDUCATION-BOSNIA: Western School Textbook Inspectors Trigger Row

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Kevin Sullivan

SARAJEVO, Nov 8 1998 (IPS) - When is a crime not a crime? When it’s a mistake. This semantic distinction has sparked a row over school textbooks in Bosnia-Hercegovina.

Under the auspices of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) – charged with implementing the 1995 Dayton Agreement which ended Bosnia’s three-year war – a commission of Bosnian and international experts has spent a year studying school textbooks.

Their aim was to identify language which might encourage ethnic hatred or hamper communal reconciliation.

But a sub-group working under the OHR textbook vetting scheme recommended in the summer that the term “crime” be replaced by “mistake” in one sentence of a grammar textbook used by 14-year olds in Sarajevo Canton.

When the recommendation became public at the end of October a major row developed.

The sentence in question, designed to illustrate the genitive case, reads in the original, “Are they aware of their crimes?”

The committee of experts decided that children traumatised by the war might read into this example connotations of wartime culpability and suggested that “Are they aware of their mistakes?” might be less psychologically allusive.

The issue has been complicated by press coverage suggesting that the OHR and UNESCO, which has experts on the textbook review committees, are seeking to whitewash the past in pursuit of cosmetic ethnic reconciliation.

On Wednesday the OHR issued a statement pointing out that the recommended change applies to a single sentence in a grammar book and that there is no question of making comparable substitutions in all the textbooks reviewed by the committee.

The chairman of Sarajevo’s Cantonal Government, Mustafa Mujezinovic, said at a press conference Wednesday that references to the recent hostilities might be out of place in grammar lessons and consequently the cantonal government does not object to the removal of contentious language from texts not specifically dealing with history.

UNESCO’s director in Bosnia-Hercegovina Dr Colin Kaiser, in a statement issued from UNESCO’s Paris headquarters, hit out angrily at Bosnian press reports which suggested UNESCO is trying to dictate what is or isn’t taught in Bosnian schools.

He pointed out that the working groups charged with vetting textbooks have no authority to implement their recommendations, which are passed along to the local education authorities for approval or rejection. He also accused the local press of “cowardly attacks” on UNESCO over the textbook affair.

At the heart of the controversy is a perception in Bosnia that a consequence of the Dayton Agreement has been to place the Bosnian war beyond any kind of moral scrutiny.

In this light, efforts to render school textbooks, particularly history texts, free of bias, are seen as suspect.

They feel that the use of words like genocide, concentration camp, aggression and humanitarian catastrophe aren’t going to induce a spirit of forgiveness. On the other hand, excising such terms from accounts of the Bosnian conflict will distort the truth.

Safet Halilovic, general secretary of the Party for Bosnia- Hercegovina, a junior partner in the ruling coalition government of President Alija Izetbegovic, said his party objects to “the cosmetic treatment of history, and programmes of collective amnesia which open the door to new aggression and the ultimate disappearance of Bosnia-Hercegovina.”

Allowing for the fact that in non-history textbooks contentious language ought to be avoided, the minister for education in Sarajevo’s cantonal government, Malik Kulenovic, said the government insisted on the use of terms such as genocide, “urbacide” (the destruction of cities”, aggression, and concentration camps in school textbook accounts of the Bosnian war.

“World War Two fascism should not be forgotten, not because of bitterness but so that it is not repeated,” Mr Kulenovic said. “A similar situation applies to more recent history. A crime cannot simply be renamed a mistake.”

The OHR defended the process and argued that the textbook reviews serve to “identify and eliminate elements likely to induce intolerance and ethnic hatred”.

It said in a statement that the textbook reviews “are essential in creating the country envisaged in the Dayton Peace Agreement: a Bosnia and Hercegovina in which all its citizens feel fully accepted and respected regardless of their place of residence or their ethnic affiliation.”