The aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina, the genocide in Srebrenica, the siege of Sarajevo, and other events during the war are not incorporated into the education system, and it is necessary to work on the content, based on relevant facts, on which students will be able to make their judgment about it.
This was said at the 'Genocide in Srebrenica: From Courtroom to Classroom' conference on the facts established before the Tribunal/Mechanism and their use in education, which the Information Program for Affected Communities of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Courts organized in cooperation with Sarajevo Canton Memorial Fund and the Center for Post-Conflict Research.
New framework
Director of the Sarajevo Canton Memorial Fund, Ahmed Kulanić, said that this conference aims to offer a new framework for studying and dealing with the past in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war in an objective way, with judicially determined facts and court rulings.
- In this way, we want to offer a new platform to students who will be able to look at the past objectively and make their judgment about it - he pointed out.
Kada Hotić, President of the Movement "Mothers of Srebrenica and Žepa Enclaves", said that silence will not change anything.
- If we talk about and give importance to the past in which people were murdered, suffered, persecuted, and raped, our youth would have no future - believes Hotić.
She claims that history must be studied in the school curriculum to raise children to be fair and aware.
Education system
Rada Pejić-Sremac, a coordinator of the Mechanism Information Program for Affected Communities (MIP), pointed out that the conference aims to bring the work of their project closer together since they have been collaborating with teachers and professors of history from the area of the former Yugoslavia since 2019.
As a result of this cooperation, she added, they managed to introduce court-established facts and exhibits before the Hague Tribunal into the classrooms of the former Yugoslavia.
She added that their goal is to take this project to a new level and to show the general public what are the possibilities when it comes to judicially established facts and how they can be used in classrooms.
The conference "Genocide in Srebrenica: From Courtroom to Classroom" was attended by representatives of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, educational institutions of the Sarajevo Canton, the European Association of History Educators, non-governmental organizations and international organizations.