A figure resembling the left-leaning Bosnian Croat Presidency member Zeljko Komsic, whom Croat nationalist dislike and claim he was elected by majority Bosniaks and can therefore not represent them, is to be set ablaze on the last day of Carnival on Tuesday.

A fake Komsic was also ‘arrested’ in a performance the Croat ‘Seljacka Sloga’ (Peasant Unity) cultural association organised in the small town of Trebizat. The association said that Komsic will “face justice.”

Capljina is one of the more than dozen Croat-majority municipalities in Bosnia and Herzegovina where local authorities declared Komsic ‘persona non-grata’ after he won the election in October last year.

Komsic defeated hardliner Dragan Covic and took the Croat seat in the tripartite Bosnian presidency form him. Covic’s party and his supporters claim that Komsic cannot be a legitimate Bosnian Croat representative because he defeated Covic thanks to the fact that both Bosniaks and Croats can elect the Bosniak and Croat representatives in the Presidency and that the numerically dominant Bosniaks elected both.

Covic’s party, the Croat Democratic Union (HDZ), has repeatedly claimed that Croats had no representatives but that Bosniaks now have two. The party insists on the change of the country’s election law so it would allow people to only vote for members of their own ethnic group.

But Bosniaks and left-leaning parties oppose such a concept, saying it would only be possible to achieve through a further territorial division of the country.

The Democratic Front (DF), the party Komsic is the leader of, issued a statement in which it quoted a recent statement by Komsic, who said, “let us be courageous and not let them shake us up with their visions of dividing the state.”

“Although it is as part of a carnival, we thank you for thinking of the President of Bosnia and Herzegovina and for helping his rating be raised continuously,” the DF said.

Dragan Covic dismissed the planned performance as just being part of a carnival and saying his own image was previously featured in the past as part of the event.

“It is questionable whether it should have been done, but it’s just carnival,” he said.

A f“As for the second Bosniak Presidency member (as he calls Komsic), I have no comment,” he added.