Politicisation of education at its peak

Events surrounding the University of Sarajevo (UNSA), the rector's inability to navigate the entire story, and the role of ‘displaced centres of power' that manage the Faculty of Medicine, which relate to Sebija Izetbegović and her clique, as well as the role of the SDA personnel officer and certain representatives of the Student Parliament in the University's Governing Board, clearly indicate that the politicisation of education, the Faculty of Medicine, and the University of Sarajevo itself has reached its peak.

The orchestrated case of Prof. Gavrankapetanović and other professors at the UNSA Faculty of Medicine is an indicator of the serious decadence of the old 'political class' which, in the brutality of its blind desire to persist in power, without any regard for the public good, systematically and at the level of its politicking, ruins the most significant University in the country and one of the highest-quality faculties of that University.

I want to clarify that the new Law on Higher Education, adopted under pressure from the aforementioned individuals, deliberately introduced confusion in the segment relating to KCUS and its relationship with the University of Sarajevo.

However, according to the current Law on Health Care from 2010, KCUS does not exist at all, but rather UKCS, which as such is not a teaching base of the University of Sarajevo but a teaching base of the Faculty of Medicine (as, for example, in Zagreb), so the general director of KCUS cannot be a member of the University Senate; only the dean of the Faculty of Medicine can be.

The general director can be a member of the Scientific-Teaching Council of the Faculty of Medicine but by no means a member of the University Senate. The game with the name KCUS-UKCS is linked to the direct interests of Sebija Izetbegović in the University of Sarajevo. According to the current Law on Health Care from 2010, the founder of this institution is the Parliament of the Federation together with the Assembly of Sarajevo Canton and the assemblies of several other cantons, and the institution is called UKCS. However, in the court register, it still states that the founder of this, our largest health institution, is the Presidency of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and that the name is KCUS. The reason is the incomplete re-registration of KCUS into UKCS, which is mandatory according to the Law from 2010.

If it is KCUS, and not UKCS, then the Clinical Centre is a full member of the University Senate, and the general director of KCUS sits in the University as a senator and is equal in decision-making with the deans of all faculties that are members of the University. I reiterate that there is an obligation, according to the current Law on Health Care, to carry out the re-registration of KCUS into UKCS, which was partially done before the SDA again took over all levers of power, so the Clinical Centre was even given the name UKCS. But since the 'old ruling political class' embodied in the privatised SDA wants Sebija Izetbegović to be a senator, general director, and have the powers of a dean, and to use that position for her own positioning within the University, as well as for achieving set political goals, the name KCUS is being reinstated.

With the role implied by such a name, KCUS begins to treat the Faculty of Medicine from the position of a principal, and the general director, together with her chosen and politically suitable clinicians (professors of the Faculty of Medicine who work the majority of their working hours at KCUS), starts replacing and appointing deans of the Faculty of Medicine who are suitable to her, blackmails and dismisses unsuitable professors, creates scandals at the centre of which she places the unsuitable. In a word, she destroys the decades-old structure on which medical education rested, solely for the sake of her own, long-term unsustainable, intention to be a centre of power and an authoritarian core of domination, which as such cannot belong to the sphere of education and science.

I also remind that students from ten student associations and organisations stated that the President of the SPUS Assembly, Bekir Rovčanin, lost his student status a year ago by graduating from the Faculty of Medicine and is currently an employee of the Stari Grad Health Centre. The President of SPUS, Merim Serdarević, is employed as a lawyer at TVSA. The Vice-President and student-vice-rector, Rijana Jusufbegović, is a candidate for representative in the Assembly of Sarajevo Canton. The student representative on the UNSA Governing Board, Haris Zahiragić, is an employee of the Sarajevo Canton Health Insurance Institute and a candidate for representative in the Assembly of Sarajevo Canton.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Prof. Dr. Kemal Dizdarević is a specialist neurosurgeon and subspecialist in cerebrovascular surgery at the Clinical Centre of the University of Sarajevo. He is a professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Sarajevo. He is the author of several books and scientific papers.