According to Bosnia’s international administrator, Valentin Inzko, the country’s tripartite Presidency Chairman and its Serb member, Milorad Dodik, “proved to be a coward” in the way he handled the removal of a plaque dedicated to war criminal Radovan Karadzic from a dormitory, as well as the scandal that erupted regarding an Orthodox icon he gave to Russia’s Foreign Minister.
Inzko is the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, tasked with overseeing the civilian implementation of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement.
RELATED NEWS
The plaque with the name of Karadzic which Inzko was referring to was removed from the dormitory in Pale, near the capital, in December.
The move came in light of pressure by international community actors to stop the glorification of war criminals in the country. Inzko said shortly before the plaque was removed that he would advocate for the European Union to ban entry to politicians in Bosnia who glorify war criminals.
Dodik remained defiant on the issue in statements he gave the media.
However, Karadzic’s daughter, Sonja Karadzic, then also asked for the plaque with her father’s name to be removed from the dormitory. By the end of the day, it was gone.
The other issue Inzko referred to revolves around the 300-year-old gilded Orthodox icon which Dodik gifted to Russia’s Sergey Lavrov in December.
The Ukrainian Embassy in Sarajevo sent a note to the BiH Ministry of Foreign Affairs asking for detailed information on the origin of what it suspects is a piece of Ukrainian cultural heritage and Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture said the icon could have been illegally taken from the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Luhansk by mercenaries.
Bosnia’s Prosecutor’s Office has meanwhile launched an investigation into the matter.
By the end of the month, the icon was returned to Bosnia via the Bosnian ambassador in Moscow, per Russia’s request.
Dodik, meanwhile, argued that the artefact is not a piece of Ukraine’s cultural heritage and that it was the property of a local family in the city of Banja Luka.
“Dodik proved to be a coward, he did not remove it but asked Radovan Karadzic's daughter to do it. The same thing happened with the icon, when he said that he received it from some family,” Inzko said.
He also spoke about the glorification of war criminals in Bosnia, saying that “people's consciousness must change.”
“There are no bad peoples, but there are bad individuals. I can say that as an Austrian. We had a lot of war criminals in World War II. Some were shot, some sentenced to life imprisonment, but it is important that the consciousness of the people changes, that we are not proud of such people,” he said.
“That should happen here and I'm sure it will happen,” he added.
Kakvo je tvoje mišljenje o ovome?
Budi prvi koji će ostaviti komentar!