Sarajevo, Bosnia
29 June 2017 

The young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina stand up for quality of education and a region without borders.

“Currently, the biggest challenge in Bosnia and Herzegovina for young people is the quality of education,” Gutic told the Balkan Forum.

According to him, education in the entire region is completely outdated, however Bosnia and Herzegovina is facing an additional challenge inside it’s territory, and this is ethnic segregation of the schools.

In June 2017, the Association of High school students of Bosnia and Herzegovina together with local pupils won the battle in Jajce (Central Bosna), where local politicians wanted to separate pupils of different nationalities into different groups.

The pupils, their parents and different NGO's, including the Association Faruk is representing, didn’t want to agree for separating the children according to their ethnic background, therefore they launched the protests in Jajce this summer and won the battle against segregation.

“We launched a separate initiative “Our school” which brought together all the high school pupils in Bosnia and Herzegovina, who were supporting the idea of defending school in Jajce.”, Gutic explains.

We opposed the idea of implementing the so called “Two schools under one roof”, which means simply segregation of the pupils in public schools in accordance to their ethnicity. 

According to Gutic, there are for sure 55 schools in Bosnia and Herzegovina which are facing similar problem. 

“Precisely because we discovered similar problems in other municipalities, the high school pupils wanted to be together and to support each other (in fighting this problem)”, Gutic informed.
“Young people rebelled against the system, we organized a peaceful gathering in Travnik, more than 300 high school pupils came to the protest,” 

Gutic noticed, while adding that the initiative gained also a wide support across the region from international organizations, the media, and artists, like famous Marcelo, Dubioza Collective and others.

Gutic is rebellious that politicians and authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina don’t have ears to listen to the problems of different social groups.

“We, the youth watch the protests every day in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We, the young people want only quality education, we don’t want anyone’s money. We’re not vilify anyone. We do not want to be pigeonholed (as supporters of some political movement). We want to communicate with our colleagues, be it Aleksandar, Hrvoje or Faruk,” he said.

He also praised current cooperation with the Association of High school pupils of Serbia, Montenegro. Gutic sees the regional cooperation of youth as the way to overcome the problems the pupils in the region are facing, but also, in his opinion the same matrix should be used by the politicians.

“If we, the high school pupils can collaborate on the project that aren’t crucial for the two countries, but are important for the young people, I don’t see any reason why the representatives of the two countries (Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia) who often say that their youth is there future, don’t have the ear to listen to us, saying that regional cooperation is something we stand for,” Gutic says.

“We see we’re all on the same level, we want to live together, we fight for quality not quantity, and they (the politicians) poison us with nationalism,” Gutic concluded.

Watch Video Interview of Faruk Gutic