SARAJEVO, March 29 (Hina) - The chairman of Bosnia-Herzegovina's Presidency, Sulejman Tihic, has announced an initiative to change the names of the country's two entities -- Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation -- which
would open a new cycle of changes to the internal structure of Bosnia-Herzegovina established by the 1995 Dayton peace accords.
SARAJEVO, March 29 (Hina) - The chairman of Bosnia-Herzegovina's
Presidency, Sulejman Tihic, has announced an initiative to change the
names of the country's two entities -- Republika Srpska and the
Muslim-Croat Federation -- which would open a new cycle of changes to
the internal structure of Bosnia-Herzegovina established by the 1995
Dayton peace accords.#L#
In an interview with the Sarajevo daily "Dnevni avaz" published on
Monday, Tihic said that he was planning to use his constitutional
powers to file a request with the Constitutional Court to change the
names of the two entities.
He said it was inappropriate for a country to be made up of a republic
and a federation and that for this and some other reasons it was
necessary to adjust the Constitution to the International Convention
on Human Rights. He added that this was also one of the obligations of
Bosnia-Herzegovina as a member of the Council of Europe.
Tihic's announcement came two days after the Constitutional Court
found illegal the names of towns with ethnic prefixes. This opened the
process of changing the names of towns that had the prefix "Serb"
attached to them during the war following the expulsion of Muslims and
Croats from the present territory of Republika Srpska.
The constitutionality of ethnic prefixes in place names was questioned
after the adoption in 2001 of constitutional amendments stipulating
that all the three ethnic communities had the status of constituent
peoples in the entire territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina regardless of
the entity they lived in.
(Hina) vm sb