The Igman Initiative called for an end to the "ethnic disintegration" of Bosnia and Herzegovina's institutions, at a conference on the Dayton Accords on Monday, and proposed a new conference on the Agreement, with the full participation of its signatories.

The video conference titled “Bosnia and Herzegovina and the region a quarter of a century after the Dayton” was organized on Monday in front of the Igman Initiative by the Center for Regionalism from Novi Sad and the Tuzla Citizens’ Forum. It was attended by activists, political analysts and lawyers from Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro.

The Igman Initiative is a regional network of non-governmental organizations, founded in 2001 in Novi Sad, Serbia, which aims to improve relations between the signatories of the Dayton Peace Agreement which ended the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia.

Panellists said that the Dayton Accords had stopped the three-and-a-half-year-long war in Bosnia, but that the international community could have shown the same determination earlier and thus likely prevented the war.

The initiative proposed an international conference involving the United States, the European Union, Bosnia, Montenegro, Croatia and Serbia – countries that were included in the Dayton Peace Agreement signed 25 years ago.

“The Dayton Agreement was about ending the war, turning the truce into peace. The topic of that conference would be, for example, ‘Bosnia as a united and functional state of equal citizens’,” the statement reads.

Initiative members believe that the agreement did not offer a state structure that would eliminate the causes of the conflict, and that in some aspects it “confirmed its results.” They emphasized that it is not a “holy scripture” and that it should be revised in order to better serve Bosnian citizens.

“We ask all three sides (Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats as constituent peoples) to stop the ethnic disintegration of Bosnian institutions, which leads to the country's disintegration,” the statement said.

In their statement, Initiative members noted that a functional Bosnia is in the interest of both Croatia and Serbia, so the politicians of the two countries were also called upon to “stop treating parts of Bosnia as their protectorates, to respect the country’s institutions and to treat them as institutions of other sovereign states.”

“They should change their policy towards Bosnia, stop supporting policies leading to the destabilization of the country or, more or less openly, call for its destruction. Such policies are justified by the interests of the Croat and Serb people in Bosnia, but are harmful to all citizens of that country, regardless of nationality,” the statement said.