Young, Bosnian, and searching for a future

At 18, Amar Prasovic thought he could change the world – or at least help get his war-torn country back on its feet. Elected to a four-year term on the Sarajevo City Council in 1998 while still in high school, he had hopes of making a difference in Bosnia's efforts to build a new future.

A year later, Mr. Prasovic decided he was wrong. Disillusioned with politics, he quit the city council with three years left in his term. "I don't like to lie," he explains. "To be in politics you have to lie. You have to make promises that you can't keep."

The youthful former city councilor, now studying history at the local university, isn't the only young adult not sitting down at the political table in Bosnia these days. As Bosnia's leaders and the international community that has overseen day-to-day life here since the end of the war in 1995 contemplate the country's future, they are belatedly realizing that young people – the one group most often associated with a nation's future – are distinctly absent from the conversation.

"One thing we have not done very well," admits one Western official, "is to convey to young people what their stake is in [the future of] this country."

Concern over the involvement of youth in shaping Bosnia's future has been gaining a sense of urgency here recently. The country faces elections, expected to be held in October, which observers worry may open the door to renewal of the kind of nationalist sentiments that fueled the war, which ended in 1995 after killing more than 200,000 people. In addition, the international community has begun openly discussing a timetable for withdrawing from Bosnia within the next few years.

On one hand, say observers, the complex thicket of elected bodies that govern Bosnia from the local to the national level – some 14 parliamentary bodies in all – have done little, if anything, to encourage youth involvement or even to establish youth commissions or offices that directly address the concerns of young people. In fact, almost every youth program in the country – from entrepreneurial competitions to after-school centers – has been started by foreign donors or international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

"Youth are the future here, that seems obvious," says Urdur Gunnarsdottir, spokeswoman for the Bosnia office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which helps monitor elections and promotes democratic values. "But if you look at what's been done to encourage them, you see very little. There's a big problem with the Bosnian political authorities not letting these kids through."

With an eye to upcoming elections, OSCE launched an ongoing program last fall that brought the country's top-ranking politicians into direct contact with young people through MTV-style question-and-answer sessions.

At the first gathering last November, young people met with Zlatko Lagumdzija, Bosnia's foreign minister and head of the Social Democratic Party, which leads the current moderate coalition government. He came right out and told his youthful audience that if they wanted political power, they were going to have to take it themselves, because his political party wasn't going to help them do it – although he said later that his remarks were intended to provoke young people into action.

"The message from the government is too negative," says Jan Zlatan Kulenovic, the 19-year-old program manager of the Youth Information Agency, a Bosnian NGO funded by the Soros Foundation. "The general message is OK, youth should [be involved]. But they're not creating the environment for that to happen.

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