Travnik High School is one building that has been split into two: the well-kept blue side is for Catholic Croats, the other for Bosniak Muslims

Some schools are more equal than others. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, that can even apply when the schools share the same building: in a state-sanctioned set-up, Croatian Catholic children are schooled apart from their Muslim Bosniak peers.

The division is starkly apparent at the high school in Travnik, a town 90km west of the federation’s capital, Sarajevo. When Croat Catholic children arrive each morning, they head towards a well-maintained, carefully painted building and climb a set of clean, weed-free steps. Metres away, on the other side of a ragged but effective wire fence, Bosniak pupils cross an unweeded yard to approach part of the same building. Their section is crumbling and graffiti-scarred. At lunchtime the Bosniak children make do with snacks from a kiosk; the Catholic children file into a canteen. The Croat pupils enjoy modern facilities and equipment paid for by the Croatian government; the Bosniaks worry about their smashed windows.

Racist graffiti in a nearby town

Catholic Croat students attend computer lessons

Across the country, this scene is repeated in scores of schools, across all age groups: Save the Children estimates that 62,500 pupils lead a divided life, a separation that did not exist before the war. The situation was formalised after the 1995 Dayton Accord ended the war in Bosnia – the move was intended to allow the Croatians in the federation a measure of independence. Now, as children grow up familiar with division, it could also be said to distract from a soaring unemployment rate.

“Our windows get broken quite a lot,” says Hasib Zahirovik, a 13-year-old pupil at the Bosniak school in Vitez. “They generally break them over the weekend, when no one will catch them”

“It’s difficult to talk about the problems we have,” one Croatian parent in the town of Vitez told Olivia Arthur, who took the photographs on these pages. “Someone is always going to come out of that conversation in a bad light. That’s why people don’t talk about it, they just accept it. And that’s why the kids don’t notice much that the other children are being treated differently.”

Marijana Vidovic, 12, enjoys karate lessons at a sports centre behind her school (Bosniaks have a separate team). “I’ve never been inside the Bosniak school. I know they don’t have enough space, though”

Run-down corridors in the Bosniak side of Vitez school

Save the Children is launching a programme in the region this month to encourage inclusion. Its local co-ordinator, Danijel Hopic, said that at one divided high school many Bosniak pupils, teachers and parents immediately set up liaison groups and elected student reps, while only one of their Croatian counterparts attended the first briefing.

“I don’t know much about the pupils in the other school,” said Djenana, a 15-year-old Bosniak girl in Travnik. “I don’t have any Croat friends. I’ve never really thought about why we have separate schools; it’s just the way it is.”

www.savethechildren.org.uk

Music lessons at the Croat elementary school in Vitez. Its pupils enjoy modern facilities paid for by the government. Students lead largely separate lives to Bosniak children

A classroom in the Bosniak side of Vitez school

The rear of Travnik High School Alema, 13, with her mother: “I feel bad in this school”

A well-decorated corridor in the Croat school in Vitez