There can be no stable and prosperous Serbia without a stable and prosperous Bosnia and Herzegovina, former Serbian presidential candidate and National Ombudsman, Sasa Jankovic, said on Sunday at a session of intellectuals in Sarajevo.

Jankovic was a guest speaker at the ‘Circle 99’ (Krug 99) association of intellectuals session, titled ‘How to reset the relationship between Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina’.

He said he was convinced that without regional cooperation on all levels “we cannot leave the atmosphere of poverty, misery, crime and regressiveness.”

No country can fight by itself against the bad things in society that have been built up throughout the past decades, he said.

“I am deeply convinced that there can be no stable and prosperous Serbia without a stable and prosperous Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Jankovic stressed. “For a quarter of a century we are waiting for someone to take us by the hand and into a better future.”

Part of the international community has an interest in the region staying a “crisis area in Europe,” Jankovic said, as then it can be used for other political purposes.

“And the other part of the international community, which would truly want to see the Balkans become an oasis of a good life, has, it seems, more important matters to attend to,” he said.

“What’s left to us? Us alone,” he said.

Krug 99 head, Adil Kulenovic, said that he perceives citizens in the countries as the smallest problem in the attempt to start the relationship between the two countries anew.

The citizens were not those who created the bad part of that relationship, those were rather the ethnopolitical elites who built up their positions, took power and won elections based on a narrative of fear, he said.

Institutions need to maintain adequate relations between each other, he said, and called upon Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic to fully respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina.