By Daria Sito-Sucic

BANJA LUKA, Bosnia (Reuters Life!) - You'd never guess at first glance whether Bosnian teen Tanja Bekic is Muslim, Serb, Catholic or from a mixed marriage and that's the point of attending a
Catholic school.

The 17-year-old's secondary school in Banja Luka is one of seven Catholic schools that have become islands of multiculturalism in the deeply divided society of Bosnia.

Bekic is in her third year at a school which is referred to only as the "Catholic Gymnasium," in a building without signs and where public spaces lack the usual crucifixes and portraits of the Virgin Mary found in Catholic schools the world over.

Even the entrance is a little hard to find at first.

To see Bekic and her school friend Tanja Savic, dressed in their jeans and wearing make-up, one could not distinguish them from typical students anywhere in central and eastern Europe or most other places in fact -- and that's the way they like it.

They say the Gymnasium's deliberate ethnic blindness helps free them from the constant focus on ethnic and religious differences that has pervaded Bosnian society since Yugoslavia's bloody break-up in the 1992-1995 war which blighted the region.

"I am really happy to be here," Bekic said. "Most students here are from mixed marriages, we can learn how to accept more easily members of other ethnic groups."

State schools in the country became segregated into mono-ethnic institutions after the war split Bosnia into two autonomous and ethnically based regions -- the Muslim-Croat federation and the Serb Republic.

Many children from mixed marriages, who have become a new minority in Bosnia's largely mono-ethnic towns and schools, feel better protected in mixed Catholic schools from the stigma of ethnic identity that mark out "different" students.

At Banja Luka's Catholic Gymnasium, 60 percent of students are Orthodox Serbs, 25 percent Catholic Croats and 15 percent Muslim Bosniaks and those from mixed marriages.

"Our mission is reconciliation, that we can and need to live together," Banja Luka's Roman Catholic Bishop Franjo Komarica told Reuters, adding that only 12,000 Croat Catholics out of 220,000 from before the war still live in the Serb Republic.

"We cannot bring the sun, although we might want to, but at least we can light a candle to banish the darkness."

IMAMS AND PRIESTS

In the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, renown for centuries for its multi-religious and multi-ethnic composition, all public schools have Muslim majorities and offer religious classes only for the pupils of Islamic faith.

But in the Catholic School Center (KSC), which opened during the 43-month Bosnian Serb siege of the city, an imam holds religious classes for the Muslim students just as a priest teaches Catholics.

"If we had enough Serb Orthodox students, we would hire an Orthodox priest for them," said KSC Dean Ivica Mrso, adding that an imam and an Orthodox priest have enrolled their children in his school.
Mirjana Zulj, a mother of first grader Tara, said she enrolled her daughter in KSC because it was the only multi-ethnic school in the city.

"Here you have children of all religions, nobody pays attention to their ethnic or religious affiliation," Zulj said. "I was raised that way and I raise my daughter that way."

Bosnia was once the most ethnically mixed republic of the former Yugoslavia and had the highest percentage of mixed marriages, something that was at one time celebrated as a symbol of success.

That delicate ethnic fabric was ripped apart by wartime persecutions, killings and the displacement of people along ethnic lines.

In the KSC, opened to offer classes primarily to Croat Catholics, one-third of its 1,326 students are non-Catholics.

"The fact this is the only school in the Sarajevo region where you can find one-third of students who are a minority is a sign of hope to all normal people here," Mrso said.

Parents also praise the Catholic schools for their high standards, smaller class sizes, attention to security and low tolerance for student delinquency.

"At first, I wasn't very comfortable as an Orthodox Serb sending a child to Catholic school," said Bosnian Serb journalist Igor Gajic, whose daughter attends the Banja Luka Catholic school.

"But the skepticism vanished after I saw how happy she was with the school."

Perhaps the most important voice to hear when discussing education and considering Bosnia's future is that of the two Tanjas, neither of whom offered to reveal their backgrounds.

"We don't feel any difference between us because there is no difference," Tanja Savic said.

"This is the way it should be everywhere."

(Editing by Paul Casciato)


© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved

http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSTRE5AO2VE20091125?sp=true

Posted by: Daria Sito-Sucic

Tags: FaithWorld, bishop, bosnia, catholic, croat, muslim, sarajevo, schools, serb, war

I was caught by surprise recently when a Western diplomat told me that Serb students were in majority in the Catholic high school in Banja Luka, a town that had become predominantly Serb after persecution of other ethnic groups during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Banja Luka is the largest town of the Serb Republic, which along with the Muslim-Croat federation makes up postwar Bosnia .

Then I learned that Bosnian Muslims account for 80 percent of students in the Catholic school in the western town of Bihac, where Muslims are in majority. It turned out that the situation is similar in all seven Catholic centres opened across Bosnia during and after the war. These schools paradoxically became rare multi-ethnic oases in the country where public schools are largely dominated by a majority ethnic group.

This got me wondering why the Catholic Church wanted to open school in Banja Luka, for example, the town in which only seven percent of 44,000 Croat Catholics that had lived before the war remained to live today. The result is a feature that just ran on our newswire. That tells the story, but let me tell you a bit more about the background.

“I am a Banja Luka native, my family had lived here for over 300 years and I regard myself obliged towards this town and towards Bosnia and Herzegovina,” said Banja Luka Bishop Franjo Komarica, a driving force behind the opening of the Catholic school in the Serb-dominated town. “I don’t have the right to feel less worthy for being what I am - a Croat by ethnicity and a Catholic by religion,” said Komarica, who had stayed in Banja Luka throughout the war and fought for the return of Croats in the town.

“Our goal is to bring people closer again, to bring back mutual respect and remove unnecessary barriers imposed onto us by politicians,” he said.

The education system in Bosnia has been in chaos since the once multi-ethnic country split along ethnic lines into two autonomous regions. The Muslim-Croat federation, the larger half of Bosnia, is itself divided between Muslims and Croats, while the Serb Republic has become largely mono-ethnic after the wartime policy of mass killings and persecution of other ethnic groups from its territory.

Consequently, largely mono-ethnic public schools have become the places of discrimination for minority groups in many ways. An Orthodox Serb or Catholic Croat pupil in a Sarajevo public school must take days off during Islamic religious holidays even though Bosnia is officially secular country. In the same way, Muslims and Croats must take holidays during Serb Orthodox holidays. The students who don’t take the optional religious classes (usually from minority groups or atheist families) are forced to sit outside the classroom, waiting for the next class. Some kids opt to take classes of a religion they don’t belong to in order to be accepted by a majority group.

Some sociologists say the difference between Catholic and public schools in Bosnia shows a simple difference between private and public schools. “Private schools can operate better because they are more flexible,” said Dino Abazovic, who teaches sociology of religion at the Sarajevo University School of Political Science and who explained the expansion of the Catholic schools network by their long tradition in the region.

Ivica Mrso, the dean of the Catholic School Centre in Sarajevo, said that schools that opened in the 1990s despite the war and destruction have remained open and popular in spite of ongoing ethnic and religious splits. “The main reason that we survived here is that we did not allow any political interference in our schools,” Mrso said, adding this decision cost them dearly in financial terms. “It would have been much easier to run the school only for Croat kids,” he said. There was a bitter tone in his voice when he explained that while many parents appreciated the school’s openess, ever more people, particularly Croat and Muslim nationalists, were opposed to the idea of bringing children of different religions and nationalities together.

To illustrate how silly it was to judge children’s nationality or religion by the school they attend, he gave an example of a student who ate a sandwich in the Catholic school’s yard during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. A group of hooligans who were Muslims attacked him for eating during Ramadan, assuming he was a Catholic who was not showing respect for the customs of the majority population. “What they did not know was that his name was Haris,” Mrso said, stressing the typical Bosnian Muslim name.

Most Bosnian Muslims were secular before the war but the majority of them turned to religion afterwards. In today’s Bosnia, atheist Muslims have come under pressure just as secular Croats, Serbs and people in and from mixed marriages.

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2009/11/25/catholic-schools-form-rare-oasis-amid-bosnias-ethnic-strife/

Volio bih znati koji je to jezik na kojem uče, kako se zove, kako
se obrađuju "nacionalni predmeti" (povijest, književnost, povijest umjetnosti),
te koje im je nazivlje iz prirodnih znanosti (azot ili dušik, elektromagnetni talasi
ili elektramagnatski valovi, jednačina ili jednadžba, trougaonik ili trokut ..) ili ekonomskih
(hartije od vrijednosti ili vrijednosnice, budžet ili proračun,..).

The 17-year-old's secondary school in Banja Luka is one of seven Catholic schools that have become islands of multiculturalism in the deeply divided society of Bosnia.

Znam za Sarajevo i Travnik, a u članku se pominje Banja Luka, za ostale 4 nisam siguran, predpostavljam Zenica i Tuzla sigurno,