Marking the International Day of Youth on Monday, Bosnia was reminded again that it almost has no youth as tens of thousands of young people are leaving the country every year, looking for a better life elsewhere.
“I already left for Italy,” a young man told N1 in Banja Luka, explaining his reasons with two words: “work, money.”
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“Here you can only survive if everyone in the household works,” he said, adding that it is very difficult for young people to become independent. “It is a lot easier in Italy,” the passerby added.
Another said he was already in Slovenia and plans to go again.
“Because of the pay, better living conditions one can not get here. It is better there, that is why everyone keeps leaving,” he said.
Young opposition activists in the city of Banja Luka have on Monday warned authorities to start redirecting funds and decreasing the administration and costs of business travels and expensive office cars. Funds should be used to projects that could improve the lives of young people, they argued.
“We have 180 employees we don’t need in the Banja Luka city administration and they cost us more than two million Bosnian Marks annually,” said Ivan Begic, from the Party of Democratic Progress (PDP).
“If we would give this to every newborn in the Banja Luka hospital, that would be 800 Bosnian Marks per baby,” he said.
Authorities are aware of the problem of youth emigration and said they have taken steps to prevent it. The government in the Serb-majority part of the country, Republika Srpska (RS), will continue with the program of subventions for housing loans for young people and will support young entrepreneurs with a total of 3,6 million Bosnian Marks, said Branka Malesevic, RS Deputy Minister for Youth. She said the RS Government plans to help 770 people get intern positions.
But as young people are leaving the country, universities are recording less enrollment. In 2013, the Banja Luka university had 16,500 students while now it only has 12,000.
Nemanja Babic, the head of the Student Union of Republika Srpska said that this partly due to private universities where students enroll because it is easier to study there but also due to emigration to countries that offer better studying conditions and quality.
Still, there is no precise data about how many young people have left the country but some surveys say the number exceeds 100,000 a year.
Assistant professor at the Sarajevo Faculty of Political Sciences, Jasmin Hasanovic, told N1 on Tuesday that the only way for things to get better in Bosnia and Herzegovina in a political sense may just be emigration and the country hitting the bottom.
“The only salvation I see is that the entire existing narrative is completely drained – that it comes to mass emigration, and that people get tired of such an atmosphere which could bring about something new and not tried out until now,” said Hasanovic.
“I think such a political potential must come from within the society itself, not from the existing political system as those are drained politicians whom we cannot expect anything new from anymore,” he said.
Only last year, 53,520 Bosnian citizens received a first-time residence permit from an EU country.
Germany issued the most first-time permits, 16,523 that year. Second was Slovenia, with 15,714 permits, followed by Croatia with 12,886 permits, Al Jazeera Balkans reported.
Croatia issued twice as many permits compared to the year before (5,526) and that number nearly doubled compared to 2016 (2,382).
Slovenia issued 50 percent more permits than the year before – 10,414 in 2017.
A lot of permits also came from countries like Italy (976), the Czech Republic (513), France (337) and Belgium (171).
The number of first-time resident permits issued for Bosnians abroad keeps constantly growing.
The total number of permits issued by EU countries in 2017 was 26,395, which is 17,155 less than in 2018.
More than 150,000 citizens have received a first-time permit over the past five years. The number of permits issued in 2009 was 12, 648, in 2010 it was 11,013, in 2011 it was 11,717, in 2012 it was 14,586, in 2013 it was 16,440, in 2014 it was 18,688 and in 2016 it was 26,395.
At least 221,576 Bosnian citizens received their first-time residence permit from an EU country between 2009 and 2018.
