Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina Zeljko Komsic responded to High Representative for BiH Christian Schmidt after his statement that Komsic was the Croat representative in the state presidency, elected more by Bosniaks than Croats, and that the Croat representative was Dragan Covic.
The Chairman of the Presidency believes that such a statement is unclear and that Schmidt will need more time in BiH to get acquainted with the Dayton Constitution.
“Mr. Komsic is the Croatian representative in the state presidency, but he was elected more by Bosniaks than Croats. The fact that the Croat representative Covic lost in the confrontation with Komsic shows how complicated the system is,” Schmidt said at a gathering called “Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Euro-Atlantic Perspectives”, which was organized by the German-Atlantic Society in Neustadt an der Aich.
He said that the Croatian part of the population, which, as he pointed out, was further reduced by emigration, felt insufficiently represented in “complicated state structures”.
Schmidt, who took over as High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina (OHR) in early August, also pointed to the need to change the election law.
“Croats must be given the opportunity to feel represented, not to end up with, say, some form of boycott of the elections,” Schmidt said, pointing to the October general elections.
“The question now is how to organize the right to vote so that the state is not divided into three entities. If that happened, the territorial integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina would be strongly called into question,” Schmidt said, Klix.ba writes.
