Working for peace in a divided country

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“They were so different from the English and so similar to us that right away I wanted to learn Portuguese,” says Dijana Miljatović with a mischievous smile that reveals the pleasure of articulating in beautiful Portuguese the memories of the Portuguese soldiers who were in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Naughty, too, because one of the reasons he gives for Portuguese and Bosnians being alike is their taste for jokes – naughty ones, of course. But good humor reigns, regardless of the language spoken: the NGO Genesis team has the ability to reinvent itself, open up to new ideas and respond energetically to all challenges – many in a divided country.

This time it was through an exchange of experiences between partners of the Robert Bosch Foundation’s “Education on Europe” program – where 4Change participates and develops new approaches to education for European citizenship – that partnership and friendship relations with the peace education organization Genesis were strengthened. A visit from 27 to 29 January to the team led by another Dijana, the dynamic Pejić, brought a lot of inspiration – but also some ideas to discuss: media literacy as an approach to citizenship education and to understanding the complex and polarized world in which we live.

The situation in this Balkan country is quite complex – Bosnia-Herzegovina is a country literally divided between ethnic minorities (Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs) and/or religious minorities (Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims) – and managed by an entity created for this purpose (the Serbska Republic, not to be confused with Serbia) during the post-civil war pacification process following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. Local jokes say that Bosnian citizens are all a little bit of each other (religion or ethnicity) and what led to the current division was power and money. Fortunately, Bosnians face everyday life with good humor.

The reality is that the entire administration of the country is divided between ethnic groups/religions, resulting in a huge amount of bureaucracy and logistics, and there seems to be a lack of space and money everywhere. With the Genesis team, we visited one of the dozens of elementary schools where they work: in the town of Jajce, curiously where the ‘unifier’ of Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito, proclaimed the independence of the Yugoslavs in the fight against the Nazi regime. Today, children aged 7 to 15 attend a school for Muslims on one side of the same building, and a school for Christians on the other, in a difficult situation managed by two different directors. But the Genesis team works for everyone and always manages to bring all the children and young people together in the gymnasium or atrium to watch theater, cinema, puppets or other peace education initiatives.

This time we saw a play for pre-teens and teenagers about internet safety – ‘Friendships are created, not added’ – written by the fantastic Azra Talić (a former elementary school teacher), the creative Ljubiša Vasić and her colleague Draško Stojčevoć who plays the lead role. And the Bosnian teenagers are like any teenagers – shy at first when sitting down with their friends, but they all squeeze in at the end to fit into the improvised audience and laugh at the situations invented by Genesis to talk about real problems.

This is also how Genesis works, whether it’s with the UNICEF methodology of ‘one minute videos’ (to give children a voice or, for example, to prevent accidents caused by anti-personnel mines, which are still in their thousands throughout Bosnia today) or in the production of a television program for children. And it’s this creative spirit and good mood that captivates us: with Genesis we want to find funds to ‘Bridge the divide’: the new literacies as a way of working on tolerance, knowledge of others and the creation of a community of global citizens.

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