On this occasion, the Muslim (Bosniak) member of the country's three-man presidency, Sulejman Tihic, laid a wreath at the grave of Alija Izetbegovic, the Bosnian Muslim leader in the 1990s and the country's president who signed the Dayton peace accords. Tihic also placed wreaths at the Partisan memorial cemetery in Sarajevo.
He recalled that in a referendum which was held on this day 13 years ago, two thirds of Bosnian citizens voted for the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which had until then been one of the six republics in the then Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (ICTY).
The results of the referendum were the grounds for the European Community's decision on 6 April 1992 to recognise the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina as an independent state. On 22 May that year Bosnia was admitted to the United Nations.
In the 1992 referendum, a great majority of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and Croats went to the polls, while most of Bosnian Serbs boycotted the vote following the policy of their leader at the time, Radovan Karadzic.
During the adoption of the decision on calling the referendum in the Bosnian parliament in Sarajevo in February 1992, Karadzic publicly threatened with war in case of the referendum. He warned that the decision on the referendum "will push Bosnia-Herzegovina into war, and the Muslim people may even become extinct."
The present-day Bosnian Serb leadership also refuses to accept March 1 as a national holiday, claiming that the 1992 referendum was unlawful.
The Serb representative in the collective Presidency and its chairman, Borislav Paravac, issued a statement saying that he did not recognise March 1 as a national holiday, and that the holiday evoked memories of what he called the anti-Serb referendum.
Sulejman Tihic responded by saying that all those negating today's holiday should be aware "that the 1st of March is also a foundation for the Dayton agreement", which divided the country into the two entities.