On Friday, the German Parliament adopted a resolution on Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in its plenary session.
A lot has already been written about it, but these is an overview of a few important things.
The first is that this resolution gives BiH a new chance. It is not a guarantee, but it is a possibility of positive change due to two key things. One is the belief that in BiH, as well as in other European countries, the fundamental principle of state organization is civil, European, and not ethno-national. It calls for abandoning the concept of constituent nations, which divides citizens into separate collectives, and instead calls for the strengthening of the concept of BiH society in which all citizens are equal.
Another important element of the Resolution is the request to Serbia and Croatia to withdraw from BiH issues. As long as these two neighboring countries actively interfere and influence internal issues, there will be no peace in BiH. Serbia and Croatia do not respect BiH as a sovereign neighboring country, they do to it what they would not allow others to do to them. Such a policy of insincerity and using BiH for its internal policy must stop so that BiH and its citizens can find their way to building a state.
These two requirements in the Resolution reflect the principles that the foundation of the state sees in the citizen whom his state protects, and to which he is responsible. That state is also sovereign and does not allow interference by others in its internal circumstances. Considering that BiH is not completed according to either of these two principles, this Resolution can be read as an incentive to help complete the construction of BiH on the principles of rule of law, protection of human rights and equality of all citizens into a stable, functional and democratic state.
The president of the foreign policy committee of the Croatian Parliament, Gari Cappelli, sent a letter to Michael Roth, the president of the foreign policy committee of the Bundestag, in which he states, among other things, that Croatia best understands the possible disruption of stability and security in Southeast Europe. With the great efforts of the international community and the co-signatory states, including Croatia, BiHwas created in wartime circumstances, it is stated.
This is not the right place nor the moment to analyze the distortion of historical facts that both Croatia and Serbia persistently do, namely that they interpret their role as co-signatories of the Dayton Peace Agreement as ‘guarantors’ of stability, and not as parties to the conflict, which they accepted under the pressure of the international community conditions for establishing peace in BiH. If it were otherwise, then Croatia and Serbia would be witnesses to the signing of the peace agreement, and not co-signatories.
Repeating the thesis that only Croatia understands the situation in BiH and is invited to speak about BiH in European bodies, Croatia must have convinced itself that this is so, and is offended if someone else, especially important Germany, thinks otherwise.
How much influence this letter caused in the German foreign policy committee is shown by the fact that the day after it was received, a regular meeting of the committee was held at which the text of the resolution was also discussed, and the discussion ended with the support of the resolution not only by the green, social democratic and liberal representatives, and also by CDU and CSU, parties of the same political family as HDZ.
Constitutive peoples live in BiH, they say, as if those peoples are not made up of individuals, each of us, with a name and a surname. Those who insist on the collective principle do not want us to be free individuals capable of thinking and deciding for ourselves. They want us to be only and only members of constitutive nations, that we are tribes that have their own chiefs to whom we should obey without question.
The problem, it seems, is in the Bosniaks, who would be in the majority in the one-man-one-vote system. Bosniaks are predominantly Muslim, so there is a fear that a Muslim-majority European state would be created there. Such fear-mongering not only reflects racial and cultural fascism, it shows that those who use it live in a dark past, far from wanting to build dynamic, propulsive and open societies.
Resolution is only an invitation, only a possibility. It is not a guarantee. Therefore, Germany will not organize BiH, it can only help to complete the construction of BiH on the principles that have been pointed out. The way out of depression and hopelessness is action both at the level of the individual and at the level of the community, Radio Sarajevo writes.
E.Dz.