The Croat member of Bosnia’s tripartite Presidency said on Monday that he would provide legal aid to the parents of Bosniak children in the eastern village of Liplje, who still have not attended school this year due to alleged discrimination, if the issue of the lack of Bosnian language classes in the local school remains unresolved.
Bosniaks students of the ‘Sveti Sava’ primary school in Liplje, near the eastern town of Zvornik, did not join their classmates on the first day of the new school year on September 1 since, according to their parents, they are being discriminated against by the principal who changed the name of their language from ‘Bosnian’ to “Language of the Bosniak people” in the registry.
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Zeljko Komsic met with the parents of the students who are seeking equality for their children and announced that he would discuss the issue his Bosnian Serb colleague and leader of the ruling party in Bosnia’s Serb-majority semi-autonomous Republika Srpska (RS) region, Milorad Dodik, at the next Presidency session.
“These children are not to blame. We shouldn’t be using them to solve our problems. We have made a mistake toward the returnees. We often used their torment for political purposes. It’s no wonder that these people are disappointed and angry,” Komsic said.
He said that, if the issue remains unresolved, the case should be brought before the Constitutional Court or the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, adding that he would help the Bosniak parents in the process.
The parents repeated that they will not back down from their demand to determine who is responsible for what happened, arguing that “this is a crime.”
