UN Shares Blame for Segregated Education in Kosovo

When the UN-led mission, UNMIK, took over the rebuilding of Kosovo's institutions under UN Security Council Resolution 1244 in June 1999, it identified a key goal in the area of education: to lay the foundations of an inclusive and integrated system. Easier said than done.

Two decades later, Kosovo's education system is still characterised by institutionalised segregation rather than integration. Multiculturalism, so often used by the international community as a working model for heterogeneous societies, has only proven a euphemism for deepening institutionalised segregation.

This is particularly true with regards to university-level education.

Since the end of the 1998-99 war, the University of Pristina has bifurcated into two ethnically segregated structures: University of Pristina temporarily relocated in the north, mainly Serb half of the ethnically divided city of Mitrovica (UPKM/UMN) continues to operate under Serbian laws and with the Serbian curriculum, while the University of Pristina in the Kosovo capital operates under Kosovo state laws and often serves as the 'castle' of the Albanian national narrative.

Both structures claim ownership over the same buildings and properties, but neither has sufficient space to accommodate the 'other'. And the international community has been complicit.

The northern part of the ethnically-divided town of Mitrovica, Kosovo. Photo: EPA/ Djordje Savic.

Deep roots of separation

The actual - if not legal - segregation of Serbs and Albanians at the level of higher education has deep historical roots.

Under Yugoslavia and its ruling principles of socialism, 'brotherhood and unity' and decentralisation, Albanians and Serbs shared the same educational facilities, but in...