From Court to Classroom: Bringing Wartime Facts to Bosnia’s Schools

Pita fainted from shock and later, in hospital, had to listen to her daughter cry while being operated upon without anesthetic because by that time, several months after the start of the war and the siege of Sarajevo, there was a shortage of medical supplies in the city.

Her daughter survived and now lives in Canada. Pita testified about what happened to little Anisa that day at three trials at the Hague Tribunal which involved charges related to the siege of Sarajevo.

As a result, the sniper incident in which her daughter was injured has become a judicially established fact. Now she hopes that the story of civilians in Sarajevo were targeted by snipers during the war will work its way into domestic history textbooks.

"If it's not included in the textbooks, it will be forgotten in a little while. Future generations and children will not know," she said.

Judicially determined facts about the war are still seldom studied in Bosnian schools nearly three decades after it ended.

"When my daughter was attending elementary and secondary school, there was nothing in the textbooks. She learned from us, because we used to tell her about it, and from pictures," Pita explained.

The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina remains a taboo topic in the domestic education system, and according to experts' analysis, children can only find meagre information in textbooks about what happened, presented from a one-sided point of view, which further entrenches ethnic divisions in society.

This is a result of a moratorium proposed by the Council of Europe to temporarily suspend the study of the war in schools, said Nenad Velickovic, editor of education magazine Skolegijum. The moratorium, adopted in Bosnia in 2000, was intended to "enable...