The Declaration on the status of Croats in Bosnia, which Croatia’s Parliament adopted on Friday does not carry much weight and should not be interpreted as “patronising” Bosnia, Croatia’s former Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor told N1 on Tuesday.
The Croatian Parliament’s Friday Declaration calls for amending Bosnia’s Constitution and election legislation with the aim of enabling the Croats, the least numerous constituent people, to be equal to the other two peoples in that country and be able to elect their own representatives.
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The initiative was sparked by the election of left-leaning Zeljko Komsic to the Bosnian Croat seat in the tripartite Presidency in October.
Bosnia’s Presidency consists of three members, each from one of the three majority ethnic groups in the country, Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs.
Bosnian Croat and Croatian officials have been saying that, in the October general election, the Croat representative in the country’s tripartite presidency was elected thanks to the votes of the numerically dominant Bosniaks.
Croatian members of the European Parliament, as well as the country’s leadership, have been lobbying for the international community to pressure Bosnia into changing its election law over the issue. They said that Dragan Covic, the leader of the Croat Democratic Union (HDZ) in Bosnia, which is a sister party of the ruling HDZ in Croatia, received most Bosnian Croat votes.
The Friday Declaration was met with criticism in Bosnia.
A group of intellectuals gathered in Sarajevo and announced they would put together an ‘anti-declaration’. The harshest criticism, however, came from the main Bosniak ethnic-oriented political party in the country, the Party for Democratic Union (SDA). They said that Croatia’s behaviour represents a “grave attempt to damage the sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
The Declaration was just a formal message to Bosnia, saying that in accordance with its constitutional provisions, “Croatia has to care for Croats outside of the country – in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the entire world,” Kosor said.
Bosnian and international reaction “showed that many are unhappy with the Declaration,” she said.
The Declaration was meant to be adopted by consensus of all political parties, but that has not happened, and it should not scare anyone “because it neither had too much impact in Croatia nor in the world.”
