Like 1300 Corporals...

The university has been institutionally destroyed and impoverished but is also enormous, gargantuan and absurd. Thousands of highly educated young people have left the country. How to find a link with Europe and the modern trends in the world? Vreme weekly seeks for the answer to this question from eminent scientists, professors, experts, and of course, students.

The hundred days of "invoking a different Serbia" which involved a civil rebellion against the dictatorship was followed on the Internet by thousands of those who in the enormous "river of no return" left the country during the war "in which Yugoslavia did not participate". Some estimates claim that between 200,000 and 300,000 young people left Yugoslavia, many of them with high education. Some fled from the army - most of them from the evil, chaos and insanity- this "national totalitarianism which threw Serbia into the worst defeat in its entire history," as Radomir Konstantinovic states. In the sea of the infinitely witty banners and slogans, there was also one very moving, political and personal one: "The Parents of the Exiled Children: Bring Back Our Children!" The parents do not forget that the disreputable former rector Velickovic approved of the mobilization of the students, that he later asked for banning their return to the country; that many of the politicians pronounced those who did not want to participate in the war as deserters and betrayers that should be sued. How many left the country? There is no official data. The regime, it seems, isn't even interested in this unique exodus of no precedent in our history.

Most of the people we talked to in the course of our research entitled "The University on the Verge of Collapse" stress that, along with the catastrophic material state of higher education institutions and the scientific and educational system as a whole, the most serious problem is the exodus of the generations of young experts.

According to the official statistics, between 1990-94, around 1500 scientists and researchers left Yugoslavia, says professor Vladimir Grecic, the author of the study "The Migration of the Highly Educated Experts and Scientists form SR Yugoslavia". The two enormous problems are evident right from the start: we are seeing only the tip of the iceberg which is indeed much deeper and jagged than might be concluded based on figures. The key information was not obtained from the people who emigrated, but second hand, from the authorized institutions which they left and which were encompassed by the poll. Therefore either there is no complete information or the information is unreliable. The direction of migration is straightforward: Canada and the United States, but also Australia and New Zealand remain "the traditional" immigration countries. Professor Grecic estimates based on the official data that 35,000 people went to those overseas countries with proper immigration papers between 1991-96, and an additional 8,000 went to South Africa, Zimbabwe, or even Hungary and Russia.

It is sufficient that 50 top scientists leave a big country to make its science headless, the famous Russian academician Pjotr Kapica once said. Yugoslavia has never been a big country, at present it is even smaller, and too many top experts left it. Professor Grecic, performing the arithmetic of the loss for the Vreme calculates that the education of an expert, according to the estimates of UNESCO, costs around USD 300,000 and if multiplied by 10,000 researchers (which is the minimal optimistic estimate) we come to a total of three billion US dollars. The calculation of the expected but lost gain, the impact of this army of experts on the technical advancement, productivity, overall intellectual level and the spirit of the time is a much more complex equation, especially considering that the average age of the emigrated researchers is 35, with 25 to 30 best years of their professional life ahead of them. Grecic summarizes that the economic loss is "astonishing, disturbing and a warning".

The School of Electric Engineering in Belgrade is probably the best case study of this dramatic exodus of the "brains". Once almost entire generations used to leave for Canada after graduation: their destinations were Toronto and Vancouver. Some half of the institutes Pupin and Lola moved there: the engineers only had to decided which team to join.

"Two years ago we sent the message over the Web asking them to let us know where are they and what are they doing, in order to find out somehow at least the approximate number of the people who graduated at our schools and left the country. It was interesting that the least replies came from Canada. We thought it was about the Balkan easygoing attitude, but later we unofficially heard that they did not want to give us addresses and they were allegedly frightened that the army and the police could be interested in the list - the majority fled from the army during the war "in which Yugoslavia did not take the part". Most of them are young people between 25 and 30 years of age who have just obtained some knowledge. This loss is yet to be felt in this country, just like when Serbia lost 1300 corporals in 1914-15. The only difference is, fortunately, that these healthy, young and probably professionally successful people are there, somewhere in the world. From the standpoint of the country, however, it is the same," says Professor Srbijanka Turajlic from the School of Electrical Engineering in Belgrade, one of the founders of The Committee for the Defense of the Democracy of the University who was a favored face among the participants of the Students' Protest.

Professor Turajlic says that indeed many of the graduates of this school left, the exact number is not known, but if 300 students graduate each year, one third leaves. This means that in the last five years, some 500 or more electric engineers left.

This year will be the first in which the generation educated under the shadow of war and sanctions will graduate. The School of Electrical Engineering is one of the few that did not lose a single work day, not even in 1993:

"During that freezing winter we were sitting in our coats, the students were sitting in their coats, pretending that the best May sun was shining outside and that birds were chirping. Our only concern was to deal with our science. My impression is that our school functioned surprisingly regularly under completely irregular conditions that ruled during the sanctions."

The school was fortunate as well, says Professor Turajlic: the biggest world organization of electric engineering IEEE (with the head office in the United States) continued its cooperation with the School of Electrical Engineering in Belgrade just like before the sanctions: they received the magazines, of course not all of them, but nevertheless enough. The colleagues from the world helped, e-mail essentially functioned, again thanks to the enthusiasm of individuals and the aid of the Greeks, so the contact with the foreign colleagues had not been lost... Some conferences were attended, although there were incidents that some countries were not willing to issue visas and print the works originating from countries under international sanctions.

Professor Turajlic does not hide the fact that the professors from the School of Electrical Engineering are very proud of the fact that the diploma from this school is highly esteemed in the world, and that the school is acknowledged everywhere. She also doesn't hide the fact that she and her colleagues are embittered because the government will not provide living conditions for them:

"This is a unique example in the world that the government is the founder, and that it is not the least interested in us. The attitude is, it seems to me, that the university represents potential danger for the government, therefore it should be canceled. This in fact is not the government's university, this is the party's university; if this were the government's university, the government would, for instance, calculate the assets lost per each hour of the Student's Protest and promptly, in three days, undercut the crisis which, as we know, lasted almost four months and almost caused the loss of the entire school year."

Regarding the humiliating wages that have been late for several months and the compensation for the scientific work, professor Turajlic does not wish to speak "for the press". She says that the greatest humiliation is when such a situation is created that one cannot even elegantly refuse this "compensation" for the scientific work one deals with out of a hobby.