On a perfect October morning in Sarajevo, the motivation for young people to be leaving Bosnia and Herzegovina in droves is not immediately apparent. The country’s capital is basking in the autumn sunshine and the pavement cafes in the shadow of the Sacred Heart Cathedral are packed. Locals lingering over coffee and cigarettes mix peacefully with the Swedish football fans in town for their team’s Nations League match.
But Sarajevo’s many charms have not been enough to keep young people in Bosnia. One local organisation that tracks emigration estimated that more than 600,000 people had left the country in the decade following the 2013 census, when the official population was 3.5 million.
“If I weren’t optimistic, maybe I would also move out,” said Timur Ilic, a 28-year-old municipal councillor in Sarajevo, who is standing on Sunday for election to the cantonal government. He represents Our Party – a multi-ethnic, non-nationalist, liberal movement that he admits faces a struggle to appeal to voters in a country dominated by ethnonationalist parties.
“People are not ready for a significant change,” he said. “They’re afraid of uncertainty. I think there needs to be a new generation which doesn’t understand why people are willing to put up with this situation and who are willing to maybe vote for us to try something different.”
The problem for Our Party – and other non-nationalist movements – is that the young people who make up their support base are voting with their feet, rather than making their mark on ballot papers. In theory, Sunday’s vote should be one of the great European festivals of democracy, with the election of no fewer than 14 prime ministers and five presidents. But the plethora of posts on offer reflects a fiendishly complicated system of governance.
The Dayton Agreement’s creation of two powerful regional “entities” – with a weaker central government – was intended as a stopgap to ensure peace after the ruinous conflict of the 1990s. Instead, it has perpetuated the divisions in the country. Most Serbs live in the Republika Srpska (RS), while the Federation is home to most of Bosnia’s Croats and Bosniak Muslims. There is no incentive for the ethnonationalist leaders to change that situation – or to appeal to young people who see a brighter future outside the country.
“They don’t want young people to be interested, and young people are not interested in politics,” said Sarah Ćato, gesturing over her shoulder to a banner of the unsmiling leader of the Bosniak SDA party looming over the cafe tables in central Sarajevo. The 19-year-old student of political science and international relations is eligible to vote on Sunday for the first time – but she says that her age group feels unseen by the political mainstream.
“Young people don’t know how to vote or who to vote for because nobody’s standing for us,” she said, adding that the reluctance to engage in politics reflects its status as a “taboo subject” following the end of the conflict in 1995. “I think educating youth from middle school on how to be a good citizen should be mandatory.”
But there seems little chance of that happening, given that Bosnian children learn different versions of their country’s recent history depending on whether they are Serbs, Bosniaks or Croats. Indeed, the curriculum in the RS now celebrates Radovan Karadzic and the late Ratko Mladić – both convicted of genocide by an international tribunal in The Hague – as “national heroes”.
East Sarajevo is just a short drive from the centre of the capital – but it is on the other side of the “entity line” that divides the Federation from the RS. The road signs are written in Serbian Cyrillic, and young people grow up “surrounded by murals of war criminals”, as 23-year-old local resident Dijana Papaz put it. She worked on an exhibition with Sarah Ćato called What If the Border Is Within You?, looking at the divisions between Sarajevo and East Sarajevo – and how young people overcome them.
Papaz rejects ethnic labels, referring to herself as “Bosnian”, but she concedes that the glorification of Mladić following his death in August reflects both enduring divisions and the need for change.
“We need to do something about our constitution, because Dayton wasn’t supposed to last 30 years,” she said, “it was supposed to be a temporary thing after the war while we made the country better, but that never happened.”
People born since 1995 may have no memories of the conflict or its causes, but they do hear plenty about it from family members. And Ajna Mešić from the Youth Initiative for Human Rights says the continuing exodus of Bosnia’s brightest prospects can also be put down to pressure at home.
“Our parents tell us to go,” she said. “Growing up, my destiny was to be a lawyer in Germany. Then somewhere in high school, I remembered I have free will. But a lot of parents will tell you that they fought the war for nothing and they don’t want us also to live here.”
Young faces were thin on the ground at a pre-election rally for the non-nationalist Social Democratic party (SDP) opposite Sarajevo’s historic city hall, with red flares reflecting off the Miljacka River as party activists put on a show. But 23-year-old Benjamin Ahmedbegovic, the vice-president of the local branch of the SDP’s youth forum, admitted he did not expect the polls to change the country’s situation – or the propensity of its young people to leave.
“Political instability has been one of the main drivers of migration from Bosnia and Herzegovina,” he said, pointing to the phenomenon of people “voting for their own” as an aggravating factor. “Everyone just wants someone who has the same ethnic label to be in power, rather than judging whether they do something well or not.”
That means the elections are unlikely to bring any surprises – or any reasons to make young Bosnians who are thinking of leaving change their minds. They may, as Ilic puts it, “miss the coffee”. But they certainly will not feel the same way about the divisive politics that leave their country stuck in the past.
