Eurasia Press & News
Outgoing Croatian President Stjepan Mesić said that there will be negative effects if Bosnia-Herzegovina falls apart.
He stated that should the Serb entity, RS, break away, Bosnia’s Croats – who currently form the second entity, the Muslim-Croat Federation – “would do the same”, with all this turning what would remain of Bosnia-Herzegovina into “an Islamic state”.
Mesić said that this scenario would play out if RS Premier Milorad Dodik “makes good on his threats to separate the Serb entity”.
The Croatian president also compared Dodik’s policies to those of late Slobodan Milošević.
Mesić said that if all this occurs, the “Islamic country” left behind “would find itself in a hostile surrounding, and would be able sustain itself only with the help of a fundamentalist regime.”
“In the next 50 to 70 years there would be a new center of terrorism. It would be a new Palestine in the heart of Europe,” Mesić said, warning that Bosnia-Herzegovina High Representative Valentin Inzko must receive support from the international community in order to “stop the political elements that want to destroy Bosnia”.
“Unfortunately, Bosnia has no mechanism that a state with a functional rule of law should have. The Dayton Agreement ended the war, but the mechanism for the foundation of a functioning state was never confirmed. We have two entities and three constitutive peoples. One entity, RS, that is, its political leadership, or better yet, the RS prime minister, does not recognize the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He does not recognize Sarajevo as the capital city,” Mesić said after attending the New Year’s concert of the Vienna Philharmonic.
As an example of how Dodik is continuing Milošević’s policy, Mesić said that there has been “almost no return of refugees to RS”, adding that “220,00 Croats and Bosniaks [Bosnian Muslims] once lived there, which amounted to 48 percent of the population, while today there are a total of 10,000 there”.
He said that Dodik “calls for the Dayton Agreement to be fulfilled, but only in the framework of the entity”, and that “someone should remind him of the obligation to help the refugees return”.
