MOSTAR: PROPOSAL MADE TO ABOLISH BOSNIA'S TWO ENTITIES

MOSTAR, March 8 (Hina) - Franjo Boras, a former Croat member of the Bosnian state Presidency, has joined a series of initiatives calling for changes to the Dayton peace accords. On Monday he proposed that Bosnia's two entities be abolished and the country be divided into 12 cantons and the district of Sarajevo.#L# Boras said in a press release that each of Bosnia's three constituent peoples -- Croats, Serbs and Muslims -- would have four cantons in which they would not have a two-thirds majority but a national majority based on the 1991 census. Such organisation of the cantons "precludes the possibility of separatism and makes the three peoples mutually dependent," Boras said. His proposal comes in the wake of a number of initiatives proposing changes to the structure of Bosnia which was divided into two entities under the 1995 Dayton agreements that ended the war in the country. The European Stability Initiative has recently proposed that the changes to the Dayton agreements should abolish the Croat-Muslim entity, while the Serb entity would have the status of a canton for a transitional period of time. A group of eminent European intellectuals headed by Doris Pack have recently publicly petitioned for amending the Dayton agreements. The non-governmental organisation the Bosnian Croat People's Council in February renewed its decade-old proposal for the cantonisation of Bosnia. (Hina) ha sb