Lagumdzija told the Sarajevo-based Dnevni Avaz daily on Friday that Josipovic "has finally stated that the referendum in the Republic of Srpska is unnecessary and pointless and that he is against the referendum in that entity."
"The other important part of his statement is that Bosnia and Herzegovina is an independent country and that he does not want to interfere," the SDP chief said declining to comment on other segments of Josipovic's statement.
Lagumdzija said he would phone Josipovic when he found it necessary to express his position on the remaining messages.
Last Tuesday, President Josipovic said that he did not consider plans of the Bosnian Serb entity to hold a referendum to be a good idea and that all important decisions in Bosnia and Herzegovina required a consensus of the country's three peoples and both entities.
Commenting on Lagumdzija's insistence that Josipovic and Serbian President Boris Tadic state their position on the Serb entity's referendum plan, Josipovic said in the statement that Lagumdzija, too, should apply the principle of consensus in his political practice.
The SDP leader said this past Sunday that the plan of the Serb entity to hold a referendum on Bosnia's State Court and Office of the Prosecutor did not have the support of all three peoples or both entities, or the majority of Bosnian citizens, and called on Josipovic and Tadic to state their position on it.
"My response to the referendum issue in Republika Srpska is clear: Big and important decisions in Bosnia and Herzegovina should be made with a consensus of all three peoples and both entities. That is why I do not consider the referendum to be a good idea," Josipovic said, describing as inappropriate Lagumdzija's asking him for his position on the matter through the media.
Josipovic says in the statement that he is glad that Lagumdzija has finally recognised and supported the principle he (Josipovic) has always promoted – that in Bosnia and Herzegovina one should not adopt solutions that do not have the support of all three peoples and both entities, but that he does not know why his promotion of that principle has drawn harsh criticism from the media in "Lagumdzija's constellation".
Josipovic recalls that ever since the beginning of his term he has been advocating the principle of full equality of all three peoples in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the need to reform Bosnia into a European country, and that he never made any statements about other issues concerning the country.
Noting that the referendum issue is a typical internal political issue, Josipovic wondered why Lagumdzija was asking him publicly to state his position on the matter. "Is it because so that some media could accuse me again of interfering in Bosnia and Herzegovina's internal affairs or something more serious?"
"Lagumdzija did not want to visit with me either Ahmici or Prijedor or any other place of suffering in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I guess I must have been interfering in internal affairs then too. Admittedly, he did visit me in Zagreb to ask for support for his post-election combinations. In that I really don't want to interfere, it is an internal matter of another country after all," Josipovic said in his public response to Lagumdzija.
The relations between Josipovic and the SDP in Bosnia and Herzegovina cooled down when the SDP BiH persisted in establishing the new government in the Bosnian Croat-Muslim entity without representatives of the two Bosnian Croat Democratic Union (HDZ BiH and HDZ 1990), although those two parties won a great majority of the votes in the Croat electorate at the general elections last October.