The leader of the main Bosnian Croat party, Dragan Covic, said on Wednesday that constitutional changes should find a compromise between Bosnia’s reality and its dream of EU membership.
“The Constitution has to be adjusted to accommodate the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as our dream about a European future and everything we want to do in a reorganized Bosnia. This won’t be possible without constitutional changes,” Covic said.
Speaking at the promotion of a book by professor and Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts member Bozo Zepic, Coving referred to the problem of Croat representation in the country’s top institution.
Bosnia’s Presidency is composed of three members, each representing one of the three majority ethnic groups living in the country – Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs.
The country is also composed of two semi-autonomous entities, the Bosnian Serb-majority Republika Srpska (RS) and the Federation (FBiH), shared by Croats and Bosniaks.
While the Serb Presidency member is elected from the RS, the Bosniak and Croat members are elected from the FBiH.
However, since there are many more Bosniaks than Croats in the Federation, Bosnian Croat representatives, particularly those of the Croat Democratic Union (HDZ), have been complaining that Bosniaks are able to elect the Bosnian Croat Presidency member. They said that this has already happened twice before and that it happened again in the General Election on October 7, when Zeljko Komsic, a candidate of a left-leaning multi-ethnic party won.
HDZ advocates for ‘constitutionality’ and the will of Bosnia’s three ethnic majorities to be the governing concept, while their opponents say the country should be organised according to a civic framework that allows everybody to vote for everybody and for non-nationalists like Komsic to be elected.
Covic and the HDZ insisted the Election Law to be changed ahead of the October 7 so that it prevents a group from electing another group’s representative but that did not happen.
Professor Zepic’s book claims the Constitution needs to be changed before the Elections Law can be changed.
“Would I only be a professor, I would have emphasized the need for a change of the Constitution first and then a change of the Election Law but when you hold a political position, then you have to keep asking for something others can recognize because they are in the same situation,” Covic said.
“What professor Zepic is advocating is a Constitutional Court decision which talks about the legitimate representation on all administrative levels, for legitimacy to be defined as something that would be implied in the Constitution, if we manage to do that with our friends, then that would allow us to achieve a certain independence in governing, but there are difficult challenges,” Covic said.
“The game that has been played over the past few months resulted in a more numerous ethnic group sending a message to us Croats saying that ‘no matter how homogeneous and organized you are, if you receive 100 percent of the votes, we will choose your representative anyway,” he said, adding that he believes a clear and rational policy could follow Professor Zepic’s formula.
He said he was ready to face all obstacles in order to justify the trust people have expressed in him in recent weeks.
