During the last week of my internship I was lucky enough to coincide
with the CIRSD Advanced Course on International Relations, which brought 30
young people from the region together for a very intensive week of lectures by
an astoundingly broad range of fantastic and high-profile speakers. My personal favourites were Alastair Crooke,
who spoke in fascinating detail about the ideological heritage of ISIS, and
Jared Genser, who has spent a large part of his career working tirelessly for
prisoners of conscience, including Aung San Suu Kyi.
The CIRSD Team
The Class enjoys a lecture
But the part of the week that I enjoyed the most was being able to meet
like-minded young people from Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo,
Bosnia and Croatia. They all, without
exception, had done interesting things, and helped me to explore new
perspectives on the issues we explored, but right from the beginning one of
them stood out for me as particularly impressive. AnjaJevic’s questions were always very well
formulated, and got right to the heart of the issue we were discussing. And, more importantly, her openness and sense
of humour endeared her to everyone.
I therefore asked if I could interview her for this blog. Her story is, in some ways, similar to many
young people born in the dying days of the former Yugoslavia, but her intellect
and ambition set her apart from most.
The fabulous Anja!
Anja, now 25, was born in Bosnia, but came to Serbia before the start
of the war. This sort of story was very
common—many people moved between the 6 ‘countries’ that made up Yugoslavia, and
most had family or close friends spread across the region. Her father was in the Yugoslav Army, and her
early years were very peripatetic. From
the age of 6, however, she was very ambitious.
Her first love was tennis, and she was asked if she wanted to make it
her life (as another Serb has recently done so successfully!), but—having
seriously considered it—she decided that the expenses would be too much for her
family. She therefore threw herself into
school, where she excelled from the beginning.
A star at maths and natural sciences, she was expected to do
medicine. However, as she grew older,
she found that communicating was both something that she was very good at, and
something that she particularly enjoyed.
She therefore chose the faculty of political science. I asked her why.
Anja: I reasoned that politics is something that
requires a broad skillset, and a holistic approach. I favour an international
approach—cosmopolitanism and multilateralism are hugely important to be, both
within politics and in the way that I live my life. I’m not interested in monocultural
situations, but love to work within a team, and to mediate between different
viewpoints and different interest.
Katie: What do you imagine yourself doing in 10
years time?
Anja: While at university I read broadly about the
roots of the conflict here, and other conflicts worldwide. I also became very interested in the UN and
in international mediation. I ended up
graduating as one of the top students in my class. [She laughs].
I suppose you could say that I’m something of a perfectionist. In the next few years my priorities are to
travel, to perfect my English, and to gain exposure to as many organizations
and viewpoints as a can. I want to build
a career in international relations, though I have no aspirations to join a
political party within Serbia; I want to stay a little outside the party system
and remain objective. I’d like to engage
with politics at the international level.
Katie: Do you worry that things will be harder for
you because you’re a woman?
Anja: I’ve never felt disadvantaged because of my
gender, but I have heard a number of stories from others. I feel that Serbia has already done a lot to
tackle this, although obviously we can do better. Women should never feel that they are in a
minority, or that their voices are in any way less important than men. There needs to be better policies on
maternity leave, so that we create a society where there are truly equal
opportunities. We need to create a world
in which all careers are a level playing field for everyone. Politics is a particular problem at the
moment – there aren’t very many powerful women to act as good role models.
Katie: Do you therefore see your future as being
outside Serbia?
Anja: Absolutely not! I love my country and I think that there will
increasingly be great opportunities here.
Twenty years after the war we still have major issues in this
neighbourhood that can be obstacles for real growth. Even though
great progress has been made, we always need to keep in mind that only together
can we find effective means and appropriate policies to improve the quality of
life of every individual and to make a better future for everyone in this
region. Serbia is also a country that is both very beautiful and very
historic—growing up through the war and the tragedy of the 1999 bombing has
made me very aware of that. There are
many things in our history that I am proud of, including WWI and WWII, when
many Serbians gave their lives to secure victory over evil, intolerance and
fascism. Although I see myself as a
global citizen, Serbia will always be my favourite country. It’s a country that has amazing raw
materials, including water, forests and hydro potential, and a very talented
and educated population, but we have simply never found the opportunity to
leverage them. We’re also in a unique
geopolitical position at the intersection of East and West, which offers both
huge opportunities and huge challenges.
Serbia has never yet been able to take advantage of this in the way that
Yugoslavia was, partly due to its size.
We need a really good neighborhood policy. And we also need to invest in the young and
in education. We need the best possible
people in top position.
And you know what, if Serbia can find even just a few more young people
like Anja I think they’ll be just fine.
Anja and I
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