A great opportunity has been missed and citizens of this country, including citizens in the Republic of Srpska, will pay a high price, the international community's High Representative, Paddy Ashdown, said on Monday night stating that the negotiations on the police reorganisation, which engaged all significant political leaders, had failed.
On Tuesday the media reported that Bosnian Serb representatives at the talks had said that they were not entitled to accept a new organisation of the police forces which would ignore the existing boundary lines between the two entities in the country and that they had to let the Serb entity's parliament to take a position on the matter in the coming seven days.
Last night, the politicians who were engaged in the negotiations in Sarajevo, were supposed to agree on new police districts so as to ensure better performance of the police units that have so far been often thwarted in their efforts by the boundary lines between the entities which they are not allowed to pass.
Recently political officials met on Mount Vlasic for a three-day meeting on the reform in the police sector at which they reportedly agreed on everything except on the new police districts.
The Oslobodjenje daily on Tuesday reported that participants in the Sarajevo meeting noticed that Ashdown and Michael Humphreys, the head of the European Commission Delegation to Bosnia, "were outraged" at the behaviour of the Bosnian Serb entity president, Dragan Cavic and his interior minister, Darko Matijasevic.
The restructuring of the police and the adoption of a law on the public broadcasting system are conditions which Bosnia must meet before the European Commission greenlights the start of the negotiations on stabilisation and association.