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Bosnian Croats in Last-ditch Fight against Education Reform

06 09 2007  New Education Law brings international recognition for Bosnian university degrees, but numerous critics say reforms either jeopardize ethnic rights or do not go far enough.

By Saida Mustajbegovic in Sarajevo

The Association of Bosnian Croat Intellectuals, HIZ, on Wednesday said the recently adopted higher education law was unconstitutional and demanded that Bosnian Croat politicians launch legal proceedings to undo this long-awaited reform.

"If there is a national interest in any area, it is in higher education, especially when such an unconstitutional law is adopted - full of regulations that seriously jeopardize the survival of the University in [west] Mostar in its current shape and structure,“ HIZ president Ivan Pavlovic told a news conference on Wednesday.

Pavlovic’s comments were the latest in a string of criticism direct at this crucial reform. After months of political bickering, the authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina finally approved a new Higher Education Law at the end of July, making it possible for Bosnian students to have their qualifications recognised in the 40-odd countries that have signed up to the Council of Europe’s Bologna Declaration.

Although the new law has been welcomed by Bosnia’s international partners, education experts and student activists say it retains key flaws from the old system, and cements disunity within Bosnia’s higher education sector by failing to provide for a nationwide system of funding.

Bosnia’s higher education reform was held hostage for almost three years by local politicians who appeared ready to sacrifice crucial reform to preserve their political and financial control over education.

In the meantime, Bosnian students continued their progress through the current expensive, ineffective and internationally-unrecognized education system.

This will now change as Bosnia joins the European Higher Education Area, inaugurated by the Bologna Declaration.

“This is the best possible news for over 100,000 students and staff of higher education institutions in the country,” said the international community’s top official in Bosnia, High Representative Miroslav Lajcak, immediately after the voting in parliament on 30 July.

“I’m glad to see that political leaders and parties have displayed a sense of responsibility by taking steps to ensure the future of all the citizens in this country,” Lajcak said.

While the international community has welcomed this breakthrough, some local and international experts point out that the newly-adopted law is the result of a political compromise, and as such, it needs further improvements.

Many insist that the new law should be seen only as the first step in the long-awaited reform of education.

The old Yugoslav-era higher education system, already considered outdated in the late 1980s, was thrown into chaos during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia.

After the war, the fragmentation of the education sector was formalised when the country was divided into two entities – Republika Srpska, RS, and the mainly Bosniak and Croat Federation of Bosnia.

Higher education was left to be regulated by entity laws, and within the Federation the complexity was only increased with responsibility for the sector being devolved to each of the 10 cantons.

The confusion has been further exacerbated by the opening of private universities which are poorly regulated.

Bosnia’s parliament first discussed the higher education draft law in 2004, but it was rejected, due to opposition from the nationalist Bosnian Croat Democratic Union, HDZ.

The HDZ insisted on retaining the funding and management of higher education at entity level, arguing that any other option would threaten the independence, or even the survival, of the Bosnian Croat University in west Mostar.

Pavlovic’s most recent comments indicate that, although changed and softened, the new law is still seen as a threat to what is perceived as a key Bosnian Croat national interest.

These and similar attitudes have from the very beginning made the higher education law a battleground for local politicians. The fighting was focused on two key issues – the financing and accreditation of universities.

Because of this petty in-fighting, two years ago Bosnia lost a soft loan, worth US $12 million, offered by the World Bank for the implementation of agreed reforms.

The current law in its original form was submitted by the Bosnian Council of Ministers to parliament for urgent adoption in June 2006, but it took over a year of further arguments before it was finally passed.

As part of the compromise, the law stipulates the establishment of a state-level agency to formulate across-the-board standards for higher educational institutions, while the entity and cantonal authorities will remain in charge of licensing the operation of individual universities.

It envisages the state taking a role in financing scientific research, while the universities themselves will be funded on the entity level in the case of RS and on the level of cantons in the Federation.

The law has had a mixed reception.

Momcilo Novakovic, a deputy of the opposition Serbian Democratic Party in the Bosnian parliament’s House of Representatives, told Banja Luka daily Nezavisne novine that, while “the law was necessary”, the “issues of jurisdiction and powers” remained unclear to him.

Novakovic also expressed concern about whether the universities’ autonomy might be undermined by the new law.

For the governing coalition, Sefik Dzaferovic, a deputy of the mainly Bosniak Democratic Action Party, was in no doubt that the legislation “ensures the universities’ autonomy, the mobility of students and teaching staff”, and that “the same standards are introduced in all institutions of higher education”.

Professor Zlatko Lagumdzija, President of the opposition Social Democratic Party, SDP, complained that the law lacks clarity and introduces meaningless provisions.

As an example, Lagumdzija stressed that having a state agency setting its own educational standards and system of accreditation is pointless since those standards stem from the Bologna Declaration.

“A copy-and-paste approach would do,” said the SDP leader. “What they need is a good professional translation team and good archiving team that would scan and record everything taking place at various universities in the accreditation process.”

Potentially the biggest problem, in Lagumdzija’s view, is the new structure of the universities’ management boards because at least two-thirds of their members are to be appointed by the founders of each institution.

That will allow the ruling political parties in RS and in the Federation’s cantons to extend their control over publicly-financed universities in their respective areas.

Bosnia has eight publicly-funded and at least five private universities.

By contrast, in 1992 there was only one university in the country.

Lamija Tanovic, a member of several expert groups for the implementation of the Bologna Declaration, says the law finally adopted is worse than any of the previous 15 drafts.

Two months before the legislation went through, she warned that Bosnia would be better off without a state law on higher education than with the draft that was about to be approved.

She believes that passing the law only served the purpose of meeting the formal requirements of the Bologna Declaration and the European Union’s Stabilisation and Association Agreement for western Balkan countries that want to join the EU at some stage in the future.

Saida Mustajbegovic is a Balkan Insight contributor. Balkan Insight is BIRN`s online publication.