The Chairman of the BiH House of Representatives Božo Ljubić and the President of the Croatian Parliament Josip Leko agreed today in Zagreb on establishing working bodies to resolve the remaining open and disputed issues between the two neighboring countries.
Members of the BiH House of Representatives, Chairman Ljubić and the first and second deputy Denis Bećirević and Milorad Živković began a two-day official visit to Croatia, where the President of Croatia Ivo Josipović, Prime Minister Zoran Milanović and the Minister of Foreign and European Affairs Vesna Pusić will receive the BiH Delegation.
“We have a lot of unresolved and disputed issues, and we agreed that we would solve them, from the easy ones to the difficult ones’’, said Leko in a statement after the meeting.
“With the upcoming EU entry, Croatia will leave CEFTA and will lose a part of its market. Now it is an important question to keep the current level of foreign trade relations’’, said Ljubić.
According to him, this mostly concerns exports and imports of agricultural products and that is why a “joint effort is important to establish the two border crossings’’ for this purpose.
Apart from imports and exports of agricultural products, other important issues are exports through the port of Ploče for BiH and the passage through the area of Neum. This is extremely important for the EU and Croatia, as well as the construction of the highway Corridor 5-C and the two brides on the Sava river.
Today’s meeting was an opportunity for an agreement on establishing working bodies that would help to make it easier and faster to reach a solution on open issues.
“We agreed that cooperation would be on the level of working bodies and I hope that some of them would continue with Croatia’s accession to the EU’’, said Leko.
“The joint strategic goal of Croatia and BiH is the stabilization of the entire region’’, said Ljubić.