EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell expressed alarm on February 20 over “centrifugal trends” in Bosnia-Herzegovina one day after Bosnian Croat nationalists threatened to scupper upcoming elections and form their own region in the troubled Balkan state, Radio Free Europe informs.
Borrell warned fellow leaders at the Munich Security Conference that the situation was extremely disquieting in the former Yugoslav republic, which is already divided into a Bosniak and Croat federation and a Serb-dominated entity called Republika Srpska.
“The situation in Bosnia is more worrying than ever,” Borrell said, “It has never been easy, but the centrifugal trends now are really very worrying.”
Bosnian state authorities and the international community are already grappling with runaway secessionism led by one of the leaders of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik.
There are also increasing pressures to find a solution to Croat complaints — in some cases supported by international legal verdicts — that Bosnia’s ethnically based divisions established in 1995 are discriminatory and must be scrapped.
National elections scheduled for October add to the urgency of efforts, including by U.S. and EU officials, to seek compromises that will allow the voting to go ahead without more of the boycotts that have paralyzed some institutions for years.
