It is worth noting that Enes Karic is no longer a member of the Bosnian government. He has been replaced as minister of education by Dr. Fahrudin Rizvanbegovic, who is an outspoken advocate of reconciliation -- despite his terrible experiences at the hands of Croat nationalist extremists during the war.
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The Chronicle of Higher Education Vol. XLII, No. 34 3 May 1996, p. A44
BARCELONA, Spain -- Bosnia's Education Minister, Fahrudin Rizvanbegovic, is a softspoken man who wants to revive a multi-ethnic Bosnia, starting with its universities. Yet his own experiences during the war might have turned a weaker person into an embittered nationalist.
Dr. Rizvanbegovic comes from a prominent Muslim family in the Mostar region. Until the spring of 1992, when war came to Bosnia, he taught Yugoslav literature at the University of Mostar. But he quit his job there when Croat nationalists began a drive to transform it into a Croat institution. Until that point, it had been, like Bosnia's other universities, open to members of all ethnic and religious groups.
He returned to his nearby hometown, Stolac, where he was placed under house arrest by Croat forces. One morning early in 1993, a combined unit of the local Croat nationalist militia and the army of Croatia arrived at his house at 5 a.m. "They invited me for a conversation," he says. "It lasted six months."
Dr. Rizvanbegovic says he does not know why he was arrested, except that Croat forces were arresting many prominent Muslims in the areas they controlled. He was held in a Croat-run concentration camp in Bosnia, where guards knocked out all of his teeth and broke several ribs. His weight dropped to 125 pounds from 200. After appeals in his behalf from supporters in the United States and France, and even from some fellow academics at the University of Zagreb in the Croatian capital, he was released.
Now in his third month as Bosnia's Education Minister, Dr. Rizvanbegovic is in charge of efforts to rebuild a shattered education system and to help the Bosnian Federation's nine cantons plus Sarajevo take over the job of running their schools and institutions, as specified in the Dayton Peace Accords.
He also is promoting efforts to reunite the University of Mostar, now divided into a Croat half, which occupies the institution's buildings, in the western part of the city, and a Muslim half, which holds classes in borrowed basements and public schools on the devastated eastern, Muslim side of the city.
Dr. Rizvanbegovic is now trying to establish contacts -- and eventually, he hopes, cooperation -- with the University of Banja Luka, the one higher education institution in Bosnian Serb territory.
He says such cooperation should be possible if the current Bosnian Serb leaders -- including Radovan Karadzic, who has been indicted for war crimes -- are removed from power.
Although most non-Serbs have been forced out of Banja Luka, Dr. Rizvanbegovic says he does not hold the Serbs at the university responsible for the expulsion of Muslim and Croat students and instructors.
"If we remove the war criminals," he says, "then we can get rid of the terrible idea that an entire people are criminals."
-- Burton Bollag
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Andras Riedlmayer