SDA on an unknown terrain: Decades of cultural and educational failures

SDA is a political party which has been in power since 1990. After the war, everybody expected a progress in every field, a better life for people, employment growth. Yet, the things have been moving forward at a very slow pace.

Led by SDA, the Bosniaks have been losing battles in every field. Extremely poorly done privatization, massive economic failure and the biggest army of the unemployed in Europe. Ever increasing debts. Failure of the educational sector, from the elementary to the tertiary. A lack of a cultural strategy over the past 3 decades since the war ended. Inefficiency of the judiciary and huge personnel issues of the executive power in many sectors.

This is the second part of our feature which critically examines the negative effects of the deadly power in the hands of SDA, the Bosniak national party.

We do not have a cultural policy and strategy of our own; we have never had it, mainly because of laid back attitude of SDA and its mainly incompetent personnel. The cultural and educational sectors have seen little development primarily due to intellectual inferiority and the lack of spirituality in SDA.

At the pre-school level, our children learn very little or nothing about the genocide over Bosniaks of Srebrenica, or about the crimes of the war.

SDA could be referred to as 'low-resistance-approach party'. Utterly wrong processes and unbearable burdening the children and their parents. The elementary school children now have to go to the 9th grade, and even obligatory Matura was introduced. It is hard to explain why the generations that had been experiencing the school as joy, do not want to let the children have a childhood of their own?

The textbooks change every other year, while the 'authors' merely change order of the words in a sentence. In most cases, they just copy and paste from the textbooks from Serbia, Croatia or even Monte Negro. Yet, the worst consequence is inability of children to learn from such ever tampered books. Those schizophrenic sentences lack logic, so it is no wonder that children are finding it hard to absorb the content. What is clear to everybody, does not seem clear to the founders of SDA's cultural and educational politics, so the agony continues without end.

The fight for Bosnian language should be taking place at the territory with Bosniak majority. Bosnian language lessons are presented as if it is about technology of space ships and not the language these poor kinds have been born in.

The standards of Bosnian language are not applied even by public media services. Everything that gets read out in the air, is read out with wrong accents. In federal media services, Croatian language has prevailed for years, so we can say that Bosnian language has not been treated equally for years. After all, those media services are also on their last legs, as SDA does not recognize the importance of the state per se.

Publishing almost does not exist. It's been a while since we heard about any state financial support for publishing. It was not much better in the past as they were receiving mere breadcrumbs, but there was hope. The neighboring Serbia and Croatia has 30 times larger publishing than BiH. In other words, 1 published book in BiH vs. 30 books in Serbia and Croatia.

Translating services are not doing much better. One of the most important jobs in the culture is completely neglected and almost humiliated. SDA needs translating services only for their encounters with foreigners.  

7 cultural institutions have been almost shut down during the reign of SDA: museums, National Library, Federal Archive, and Archive of BiH... Yet, they have managed to survive and keep working thanks to great enthusiasm of some altruistic individuals.

There is not one single feature film about the recent war history, hence there has not been any allocation of budgetary funds to that effect. Having said that, BH film industry made a series of exceptional movies mainly in cooperation with international producers. Therefore, the directors who became famous have not received anything significant from the state.

So far, the cultural politics has only had some individual characteristics of cantonal ministers. It is an open secret that a great deal of funds from the cantonal budgets have ended up in the neighboring countries.  

War documentation usually depends on whether you have conscientious and hard-working individuals. The state or, more precisely, SDA, did not wish to take part publicly.

The line of not-resenting is visible at every step. If we look at sports that has no ministry at any level, we see identical situation. SDA is a party that only plays at its own field. The funds allocated to the sports are minimal, and bigger results are achieved only by our sportsmen who live and work abroad, with the exception of fighting sports such as judo, karate, taekwondo and boxing.