ZAGREB, Feb 6 (Hina) - At the time the Dayton Accords were being drafted, entities in Bosnia-Herzegovina were a necessity, today they are a reality but they need not necessarily be the country's future, Croatian President Stjepan
Mesic said in Zagreb on Tuesday.
ZAGREB, Feb 6 (Hina) - At the time the Dayton Accords were being
drafted, entities in Bosnia-Herzegovina were a necessity, today
they are a reality but they need not necessarily be the country's
future, Croatian President Stjepan Mesic said in Zagreb on Tuesday.
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Mesic made the statement while opening a one-day round table called
"The Establishment of the Croat Entity in Bosnia-Herzegovina - A
Reality or Fiction", organised by the Forum HBH 2000, a non-
governmental association advocating close relations between
Croatia and Bosnia. The association was established in Samobor
outside Zagreb last year.
More than 50 university professors, diplomats, experts and
political officials from both countries attended the debate.
Mesic recalled that the current Croatian authorities, unlike the
former ones, had given up the idea of Bosnia being split between
Croatia and Serbia.
"However, this does not mean that we have given up assistance to
Bosnian Croats nor will we give it up because the Croatian
Constitution binds us to it," Mesic said, adding though that
Bosnian Croats had to build their future on their own, as one of
Bosnia's three constituent peoples.
Sabor deputy speaker Zdravko Tomac estimated the establishment of
the Croat entity in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not the right way to
accomplish the interests of the Croat people in that country and
that discussions on that topic should be taken off the agenda.
He explained that there was an almost ethnically cleansed entity in
Bosnia - Republika Srpska, which aspired to join the mother-state
of Serbia, i.e. Yugoslavia. For Croats to seek their own entity
would only lead to the strengthening of the Bosnian Serb entity and
eventually to the destabilisation of Croatia itself, Tomac
believes.
Croatia is interested in Bosnia-Herzegovina being a united state of
equal peoples, Tomac said. Croatia must repeat to Bosnian Croats
that they are responsible for their future in Bosnia, that they
cannot enter conflicts with the international community, even when
the international community is not right, and that the worst
solution for them is the establishment of parallel institutions.
The most important thing for BH Croats, as the least numerous nation
in the country, is for state institutions to function, he added.
A professor at the Mostar University, Slavko Kukic, said the
entities were used as an instrument in partitioning Bosnia-
Herzegovina both as a state and society because they were aimed at
completing the ethnic grouping which was partially achieved
through the war.
Rejecting the state of nations as a possible model for Bosnia-
Herzegovina, as the two terms were not synonymous in Bosnia as they
were in other European countries, Kukic advocated cantonal
organisation and strong regional self-government with precisely
defined and protected national interests of all three peoples on
the cantonal level.
Supporting arguments against the establishment of the Croat
entity, the president of the Democratic Party and Croatia's former
foreign minister, Mate Granic, said that under the current
international agreements all entities should have access to the
sea, which would require changes to the border, which he said was
currently impossible without provoking another war.
(hina) sb rml