Bosnian Green Youth is a non-profit and a non-political oriented green organisation. We are in process of registering on national level. We have about 100 members and in future we hope that we would have more members. We will keep working on it. We have already participated in two FYEG‘s summer camps in Serbia. The first summer camp that we took part in, was in 2001 on Kopaonik. Last year 2002, we took part in organising the summer camp in Topola. We applied to be members of Helsinky Citizens Assembly youth network in Bosnia and Herzegovina and officially we applied to be members of FYEG in Ghent. We where represented by Serbian Green Youth and especially by Aleksandar Jovanovic which we would like to thank for all their help.
For 2003 we planned to organise some concrete actions such as celebrating ‘Earth Day’ in Bosnia and Herzegovina (for the first time). Also we will organise the summer camp on Jahorina Mountain this year.
The main topic of the summer camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina is Peace, Reconciliation and Development. The summer camp would be held on (Olympic) Jahorina Mountain between 11th – 17th August 2003. We hope that the camp would be just as good as the Serbian ones!
According to our Bosnian Green Youth project, we have planned, the the future, to focus on educating young green leaders from Bosnia and Herzegovina. For that reason we would organize training sessions for young leaders from from all cities of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Our wish is to work together in the future, thus destroying barriers among young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina and ex Yugoslavia. As you know, we still have problems between Muslims, Croatians and Serbians in the Balkans.
Some good wind of change was made in Serbia and Croatia on their last elections and we had a hope that something would change in political picture of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This did not happen. Unfortunately parties with National backgrounds win Bosnian votes and in future we think that NGO’s are the ones who could change this.
In future we should (all of us) make more effort to educate young people from the Balkans to take part in elections. The majority of young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina do not take part in elections. If we want to change something here in Balkans or in Bosnia and Herzegovina or even in Europe we have to work on educating young people to take their future in their hands. We should not let these people who made our political system in the past years to just continue their job.
The political system in Bosnia in Herzegovina is highly corrupted and this corruption has found a good ground in nationalism. They know that they abused these past years for their own goals and they just continue to abuse. Concrete actions in our opinion is to organise summer camps, such as this one that we would organize.
Young people MUST take also their responsibility for this country. Good example is cooperation between Bosnian and Serbian young greens.
All this could not be done without help from the International Community but this International Community also has to understand that they did not discover a new island in Europe. They have to understand that we worked, lived together here before.