Bosnian political parties slam Serbia's Defence Strategy as anti-Bosnian

Tanjug/ Tanja Valič

Serbia's Defence and National Security Strategy shows that Serbia continues to wrongly interpret the Dayton Peace Agreement which ended the war in Bosnia and is evidence of its Defence Ministry's aggressive stance against Bosnia, the strongest Bosniak Party, the Democratic Action Party (SDA) said commenting the document which was presented recently.

“Bosnia has never threatened the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Serbia. On the contrary! Bosnia's internal relations were never a threat to Serbia's defence and its inclusion into the Strategy is yet another evidence of Serbia Defence Ministry's aggressive and paternalistic attitude to Bosnia,” the SDA said.

Serbia's Defence Minister Aleksandar Vuin said recently, presenting the document “Serbia's Defence and National Security Strategy” that for the first time ever, the document names the preservation of Bosnia's Serb-dominated Republika Srpska entity one of Serbia's strategic goals.

The SDA added that Serbia is no guarantee of the Dayton Peace Agreement but that its signature on the Agreement only means it admitted its participation in the Bosnian war.

“If it refers to the Dayton Agreement, the Ministry should include the first article of the Dayton Peace Agreement into the Strategy which stipulates that Serbia will restrain from any action contrary to the territorial integrity and political independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” the party concluded.

Nihad Colpa from the People's Alliance (GS) said that the Strategy comes at a time when Serbia one-sidedly suspended the Sub-regional Arms Control Agreement, thus becoming a threat to regional security.

Presenting the document, Vulin said that the preservation and protection of the Serbian people where ever they lived is among the top seven national interests of Serbia.

This, Colpa said, shows Vulin's desire to “transfer Serbia as a regional security problem from the regional onto the international global scene.”

He called on Bosnian institutions to react to these actions and recalled that it is their Constitutional and legal duty to protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of this country.

The Our Party warned that the Strategy only supports the RS entity's secessionist tendencies

“Paradoxically, the same strategy states that separatism as one of the greatest threats to regional peace, but several sentences later it instigates the same separatism,” Our Party concluded.