When I slipped into Gorazde in 1993 with a group of journalists during the war, we soon gained a young hanger-on named Adnan, a goofy-looking 14-year-old with a hooded brown coat and big floppy black boots. One dismal day one of us asked him why he was standing in a puddle. "I have stood in much worse places," he said.
At that time and place, that seemed hard to imagine. Eight years later, I didn't figure there was much chance of finding Adnan and seeing how his philosophy had developed in the intervening years. At 14 he had seemed preternaturally intelligent and somehow doomed, qualities suggesting that he was unlikely to still be around in Gorazde. But he is, looking a lot more vital than he did during the war. The cruel irony is that what keeps Adnan Kuljuh there is that rarest of commodities in Gorazde: a good job, working with the human rights officers of the United Nation's International Police Task Force in the nearby town of Foca. His mother has had breast cancer, his grandparents are ill, and his father can get only sporadic work. There is no way he can leave them in the lurch.
Bosnia can be a depressing place to be young. According to a recent U.N. study, 62% of its youth would leave the country if given the opportunity. Every plugged-in teenager seems to know the website www.nationalvisaregistry.com. The problem isn't just unemployment. The university system's quality, Adnan and many other ex-students say, has nose-dived during a decade of war and its aftermath; politics is viewed as a mussed bed of corruption; and international agencies have opened young eyes to better prospects elsewhere.
But Adnan isn't depressed, just frustrated. Obliged to stay, he wanted to form a nonprofit youth club in the Drina valley, where young people from Serb and Muslim areas could meet and discuss common problems. But Bosnia's communist legacy discourages that kind of civic initiative. He had to seek official registration for his club and was denied. The government would have been wiser to encourage Adnan to improve the puddle he's still standing in. The U.N. can't do it alone.
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Fresh Start
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Photo Gallery
Check out the photos from this leg of TIME's Fast Forward Europe voyage
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New Frontier
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Driver's Seat
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Expanding Rapidly
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For Love and Money
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A Fantastic Voyage
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Stanislaw Drzewiecki
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Anetta Kahane
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The Persistence of Memory
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People To Watch: Viktor & Rolf | Monika Fleischmann | Jan Suchan | Anaclet Kabengele Kalondji
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