Student videos documenting the experiences of the generation that lived through the wars of the 1990s are being published online. This is part of a Balkan investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) programme intended to nurture oral history through storytelling that illuminates transitional justice issues. Twenty videos in which war survivors tell their personal stories have been posted on YouTube for public viewing. They were produced by students as part of a BIRN mentoring scheme entitled Youth Memory Transfer.

The videos are the result of a training and mentoring programme that included an interactive workshop at which young participants from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia examined truth-seeking, fact-checking and transitional justice reporting as an exercise in storytelling. As a part of the workshop, the students conducted independent research related to each survivor’s history in their local community in order to gain deeper background knowledge of subjects’ personal stories.

The programme gave the students a better understanding of the history of the break-up of Yugoslavia, by documenting the stories of people who lived through it. Through the videos published online it also provides the public with insights into the experiences of the generation that lived through the wars of the 1990s. The videos were produced with the support of the Regional Youth Cooperation Office (RYCO) and the European Union.