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Dobrinja Grammar School in Sarajevo (Photo: gdobrinja.edu.ba) |
Vesna Filipović is hired as a librarian in Dobrinja Grammar School in Sarajevo. The school’s directress Sabiha Miskin made the hiring decision, at the bidding of a three-member commission, without interviewing 13 other candidates who had also met the requirements.
Vesna is the wife of Karlo Filipović, former president of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH) and a member of FBiH parliament on behalf of SDP – Social Democratic Party. Vesna belongs to the same party and she was its nominee for Novi Grad borough at the 2000 elections. Miskin is the president of the party’s supervisory board.
Alma Nedić, one of the qualified candidates, said that even before she had put in her application, she got wind that the job was set aside for Filipović who had worked at the National and University Library of BiH.
The first call for applications was put out in Nov. 2011. A certificate of good conduct and a license for Co-operative online bibliographical system and service (COBISS) were some of the requirements. Five out of 22 persons had the license including Vesna. “That license is not necessary for a work in a school library. Apart from that, licensing of a person is very expensive,” Nedić told the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIN) in Sarajevo.
COBISS collects data the library content and provides standardized bibliographic database on researchers. The main beneficiaries are university, public and special libraries. However, no high or elementary school library is a beneficiary.
Azemina Njuhović, assistant to the minister of education, science and youth at the Sarajevo Canton, said the ministry did not plan to connect the schools with COBISS. “It does not mean that it won’t happen in the future. Now, whether it’ll be COBISS or someone else, we don’t know yet,” said Njuhović.
Nedić managed to get the vacancy scrapped because of the license and the certificate of good conduct conditions. This January a new vacancy was put out without these provisions. 14 persons have met the requirements, but Filipović got the job. Others were not even called for an interview. In a letter to CIN, director Miskin said that she chose a candidate with the best references and that the vacancy made no mention that the interviews will be held with the applicants. Nevertheless, the minutes of the vacancy commission suggested that all the candidates who have met the required conditions should be called for the interview.
In the beginning of this month, CIN published a series of stories about civil service hiring in which it warned about jobs set aside and vacancies put out pro forma.
Published August 27, 2012
