Aleksandar Hemon mourns the fact that Bosniak (Bosnians of Muslim background), Croat, and Serb kids are "taught three different, quite possibly mutually exclusive, histories of their pitiable homeland":
In some parts of Bosnia, children of different ethnicities attend school in the same building, but are meticulously segregated: they go to different classrooms, share no classes, they often have different programs and textbooks, the faculty neither mix nor cooperate. In some schools, classes begin at different times, lest children have any contact or communication before or after school. … The nationalists who represent the constitutive peoples want and expect national subjects, not citizens. They want children to come out of the rickety educational machine equipped to think of themselves exclusively within the framework of their ethnicity.
(Photo of a "Sarajevo Rose" – a concrete scar caused by a mortar explosion – by Becky Tappin)
The Dish 