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An advertisement announcing Bosnia’s Mathematical Olympiad, which is to take place on May 13-14, has caused uproar because it sets ethnic conditions for applications.

According to the advertisement, 20 Bosniak and 10 Croat high school students from the Bosniak-Croat Federation, as well as 15 students from the Serb-dominated territory of Repulika Srpska, may compete.

The six best participants will qualify to compete at the International Mathematical Olympiad in July this year in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the ad promises.

Aleksandra Letic, secretary-general to the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Republika Srpska, said the requirements are “not only nonsense, but something that should alarm everyone” in the country.

“This is simply unacceptable. It is unacceptable in terms of civilisation, as well as in terms of basic intellect,” she told BIRN.

Bosnian students have the right to be educated according to their ‘national’ (ethnic) curriculum – which means they study their own language (Bosnian, Serbian or Croatian), and several subjects are taught differently according to their ethnicity, such as religion and history.

A quota of national representation is also a very familiar requirement for Bosnians – as the country’s whole political system relies on it. It is commonly known as the ‘national key’.

“How can you have a mathx competition in which you have to be classified under any national key? One may understand it if this was about religion or language, because we have a group of subjects under national curriculums, but mathematics?” Letic said in disbelief.

Those who had put the advertisement together say the quota has nothing to do with ethnic identity but just reflected the way the competition is organised in the Bosniak-Croat Federation.

In order to participate in the state-level competition, students must prove their knowledge at lower-level competitions. The entities each have their own.

But according to the president of the Union of Mathematicians in Republika Srpska, Vidan Govedarica, there were two separate competitions held in the Bosniak-Croat Federation.

“This is due to the division of this country, the way it is set up,” he told media.

“The competitions are separate, one of them is conducted in the Bosniak part, and the other in the Croat part [of the Federation entity],” he told local news organization N1.

The Sarajevo Association of Mathematicians issued a statement confirming the complicated system of competition is due to the divided education system in Bosnia.

It said that each year, all schools from all cantons in the Federation are invited to participate in one competition and the 20 best qualify for the state-level competition.

But most schools that teach according to the Croat national education plan never apply for it.

They organise their own, and the 10 best qualify for the state competition.

The Association of Mathematicians said it believed that its Serb counterparts, who created the advertisement, simply made an unconscious mistake in formulating it in this way.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE, has been advocating the elimination of ethnic segregation in schools in Bosnia and Herzegovina for decades.

“We believe the students should be assessed based on their knowledge in mathematics, and not based on a national key,” Zeljka Sulc, a spokesperson for the OSCE, told BIRN.

In the latest country report put together by the Council of Europe, educational segregation was named as one of the factors preventing Bosnia and Herzegovina from advancing toward EU membership.

“All forms of segregation in schools should end… A common core curriculum should be fully applied and further developed,” the February 2017 report recommended.

Letic also criticised the system and urged an end to educational segregation.

“This just shows how crazy we are as a society, that we would simply accept this,” she said.