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Republika Srpska will adopt a unified curriculum with Serbia covering four key educational subjects from the start of the next school year, sparking criticism from Bosniak politicians in the Serb-dominated entity.

The unified curriculum will apply to the so-called ‘national’ set of subjects – language, history, geography and knowledge of nature and society. The ‘national’ subjects are taught differently in Bosnian schools according to pupils’ ethnicity.

“I think the synchronisation is very good and we will be ready to do many things together with Serbia, especially those related to the protection of the national interests of the Serb people,” said Predrag Damjanovic, the director of the Republika Srpska Pedagogical Institute.

Damjanovic said that that the next step will be to synchronise the curriculum for secondary schools.

Bosniak politicians in Republika Srpska have criticised the initiative, however.

“We are explicitly against it. We will vote against such a decision,” Admir Cavka, the head of the Domovina (Homeland) caucus, which brings together Bosniak political parties in the Republika Srpska National Assembly, told BIRN.

Cavka warned that “if necessary, we will ask for a review of the constitutionality of this decision before the Constitutional Court”.

Enver Kazaz, a professor at the Philosophy faculty in Sarajevo, described the plan as an aggressive, nationalist move.

“It aims to create a homogeneous Serb identity, regardless of the regional conditions. It would be ideal if Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia signed valid agreements on the education system, if both of those countries [Serbia and Croatia] did not act ideologically over education in an effort to incorporate Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats into their ideological system,” Kazaz told Radio Free Europe.

The Pedagogical Institute argued that the Serbian and Republika Srpska schoolbooks are already similar and that only a part of their content needs to be supplemented.

“We do not intend to hurt anyone by taking into account the protection of the identity of the Serbian people. We do not object to others doing the same. Since 2002, Bosniak students in Republika Srpska have had a national group of subjects, as well as students of Croat nationality [ethnicity],” Damjanovic told SRNA news Aagency.

However, Bosniak children in Republika Srpska have for years been officially denied the right to call the language in which they are taught ‘Bosnian’.

Republika Srpska’s education ministry has told schools to describe it as ‘the language of the Bosniak people’, arguing that the constitution of Republika Srpska does not recognise the term ‘Bosnian language’.

The most recent attempt to change that failed on Thursday, at a Republika Srpska National Assembly session, when the Serb deputies rejected an amendment by the Bosniak MPs from the Domovina coalition saying that the Law on Secondary Education should introduce the term ‘Bosnian language’.

Parents of Bosniak returnee families who came back to Republika Srpska after fleeing during the war have repeatedly protested against this, claiming it represents discrimination. Some have withdrawn their children from schools in protest.

“The consequences of such a process by the entity authorities have led parents in many returnee schools to not allow children to go to school as long as they are denied the right to study Bosnian,” Cavka said.

The Pedagogical Institute said that announcement of the creation of a unified curriculum is connected to the so-called ‘Declaration on the Survival of the Serbian Nation’ which Serbia and Republika Srpska propose to sign at some point in the near future.

The text of the declaration, an idea proposed by Serbian and Republika Srpska Presidents Aleksandar Vucic and Milorad Dodik last August, has yet to be finalised or published.

It was announced that it would be signed on Serbia’s Statehood Day on February 15, but this did not happen.