Max Primorac, a member of the conservative United States (U.S.) think tank the Heritage Foundation and a former U.S. official in several mission structures, was one of the panelists at a conference held on Friday in Zagreb dedicated to the Dayton Agreement.
In his address, he presented a series of controversial views on the constitutional arrangement of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), the role of the international community, and the position of the constituent peoples.
Primorac stated that “Dayton was an agreement that promised equality of the three peoples,” but that, according to him, this has not been achieved. He criticized the role of the Office of the High Representative (OHR), stating that “local solutions are not possible if local actors do not have sovereignty.”
“How can you have local solutions if final authority lies in the hands of a European diplomat? This has led to constant threats of secession from Republika Srpska (RS), and the number of Croats in BiH has fallen by 60 percent,” Primorac said.
He also claimed that there is “vote spillover” in BiH, which, as he says, resembles examples of minorities in Iraq, and that the system “has created a series of negative incentives that render dialogue among domestic leaders meaningless.”
He was particularly critical of attempts to build a civic, one-person-one-vote system, claiming that this has “deepened distrust among the peoples” and that it “is not what Dayton envisioned.”
Speaking about international engagement, Primorac asserted that the “state-building experiment has failed” and that such a development has opened space for “communist China, Russia, and even Iran,” as he put it, to exploit the chaos and further destabilize the region.
As his central political recommendation, he cited the abolition of the OHR’s Bonn powers. “The OHR should exist as a facilitator, but not as an institution that makes final decisions,” he said.
The greatest attention was drawn by his claim that, because of the position of Croats in BiH, “the only realistic solution is the formation of a third entity.”
“The situation for Croats is so difficult that the only way for them to survive is the formation of their own entity. They are the only truly pro-Western people in BiH and can be an important link between Serbs and Bosniaks,” he stated.
According to him, a third entity would “strengthen the concept of an entity-based system and calm Serb fears of centralization,” while for Bosniaks, as he claims, it would “reduce constant tensions with Serbs and Croats.”
Primorac warned that Croats are “frustrated because they cannot choose their own representatives,” and that if they were to lose protection mechanisms in the House of Peoples, they would “become second-class citizens.”
“Three entities are the best solution for all three people. This would stabilize BiH,” Primorac concluded at the conference in Zagreb, Klix.ba writes.
