The President of the HDZ of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) Dragan Covic said yesterday at the conference of the European People’s Party in Ljubljana that removing the so-called ethnic prefixes or prefixes in the BiH Constitution is very dangerous for preserving the state and represents, according to him, a radical change of the BiH Constitution to a new Dayton 2 according to the completely new principles.
Covic concluded that there is a lot of uncertainty in our environment which is most directly transmitted to BiH as a very vulnerable society of unfinished democracy and unrealized rule of law.
The promised reforms were not implemented, and those adopted as a Coordination Mechanism in making important decisions were not realized. Mutually agreed agreements are not respected, and as the HDZ leader pointed out, this further strengthens mistrust between the political representatives of the constituent peoples.
“Currently, we have a completely dysfunctional government at the level of BiH, legislative, executive, and judicial in which extremely non-transparent processes take place. The crisis that BiH society is going through is at its peak and we must not underestimate that. This is the biggest political crisis since the establishment of peace in Dayton in 1995. The last agreement we signed on behalf of the SDA and HDZ BiH, with the support of the international community (the European Union: EU, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe: OSCE, the Office of the High Representative: OHR, the United States: the U.S., and BG), was implemented for the City of Mostar in order to organize elections in Mostar. A second agreement to ensure the elimination of all existing discrimination in the BiH electoral system and the implementation of all judgments of the BiH Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights, as well as to ensure the legitimate representation of constituent peoples, is being avoided. Without coordinated changes in the electoral legislation, we do not have the conditions to hold the General Elections in 2022, and that would only escalate the current crisis of non-functioning of the government to unimaginable proportions, ” stated Dragan Covic.
Further, he added that the HDZ is ready for a limited adjustment of the BiH Constitution in order to implement the amendments to the Election Law, by which “we want to implement all decisions of the BiH Constitutional Court and the international court.”
“As representatives of the Croatian people in BiH, we want to preserve the Euro-Atlantic perspectives and our homeland BiH. This implies preserving the basis of the functioning of BiH, its integral part, constituent peoples and their legitimate representation at all levels of government. When one people in BiH elects political representatives to another people, where the BiH Constitution recognizes the legitimate representation of the constituent peoples, as in the Presidency of BiH and the House of Peoples, serious cracks arise in the functioning of government.
We have such a situation right now when the larger Bosniak people were electing political representatives for Croats in key positions of power. We must urgently return to talks on these open issues of the functioning of BiH, and especially the Federation of BiH, on the principles of the Washington and Dayton-Paris peace agreements, ” Covic noted.
Covic also referred to the statement of the special U.S.representative for electoral reforms, Matthew Palmer, who told that the U.S. would like to see the removal of the ethnic prefixesfrom the elections for members of the Presidency of BiH. The leader of the HDZ BiH concluded that this would be a dangerous practice that would jeopardize the functioning of the state.
