Obstructions of Bosnia’s efforts to join NATO that are coming from Bosnia’s Serb-majority region are the result of various forms of foreign influences, former Defence Minister and university professor, Selmo Cikotic, told N1 on Wednesday.
Cikotic said that before 2010 there was a consensus in Bosnia over the country’s future in NATO but that the same Bosnian Serb party that advocated it then is now opposing membership.
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NATO has given Bosnia three conditions for eventual membership: to destroy its surplus ammunition and arms, to increase its participation in peace operations and to register all military property as ownership of the state.
The latter has been obstructed by the Bosnian Serb representatives for years.
Bosnia’s Constitutional Court has ruled in favour of the state's appeal against decisions of the Supreme Court of the country’s semi-autonomous Republika Srpska (RS) region which rejected an attempt to register a military warehouse in Trebinje under the state. Nevertheless, top RS officials have been saying the registration will not happen.
But registering all military facilities within Bosnia to the state is one of the conditions NATO has put forward for the country to activate its Membership Action Plan (MAP) – something Bosnian Serb representatives, especially those from the ruling Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD), have been trying to prevent.
Cikotic said that has not always been the case and the SNSD and their leader, who is now one of the members of Bosnia’s tripartite Presidency, Milorad Dodik, were on board with Bosnia’s NATO accession.
“We had a complete consensus on all of these issues. Back then, Dodik vocally advocated for NATO as an important security framework needed for overall internal democratic development, especially for economic development,” Cikotic said.
Then, the Bosnian Serb leader changed course.
“We must understand that obstructions of this goal started in the years after that,” Cikotic said, stressing that a consensus on the matter was present at a time when there was an SNSD representative in the Presidency and when they were part of the majority in Bosnia’s Parliament and “dominated in representing Republika Srpska in state institutions.”
“Problems emerged later, as they did for many other internal issues in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We have a presence of various international actors who encouraged representatives of Republika Srpska to stop Bosnia’s progress by obstructing this activity,” he said.
Cikotic stressed that such foreign influence is present in many forms.
“There is presence and influence coming from Russia and Serbia in a more or less direct way and we could argue that there were different forms of activities before the 1990s, during the decade and after it,” he said.
“You could look at it from the perspective of geopolitics and use of force to resolve certain questions,” he explained, but argued that it would be a lot better if those issues would be resolved in a civilised manner and if agreements reached earlier would be respected as the alternative is “very problematic and hardly foreseeable.”
“The Rule of Law is the substance of the legal and constitutional order of a state. So, decisions of constitutional courts in all states where there is rule of law represent a basis. Not all the decisions of Bosnia’s Constitutional Court have been implemented,” he said.
