ZAGREB, January 27, 2019 – The biggest political parties based in Sarajevo on Saturday strongly condemned conclusions adopted at a convention of the Bosnian Croat National Assembly (HNS) held in Mostar earlier in the day, which rejected the verdict of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the case against Jandranko Prlić and other senior officials of the former Herceg-Bosna, which established the existence of a joint criminal enterprise designed to separate parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the rest of the country and annex them to Croatia.
Earlier in the day, the HNS convention adopted a declaration calling for constitutional reforms and for the territorial and administrative reorganisation of Bosnia and Herzegovina to ensure the equality of ethnic Croats in relation to the other two constituent peoples and guarantee the country’s integration with the EU and NATO.
The part of the HNS declaration which challenges the ICTY findings drew a response from the Party of Democratic Action (SDA), the Social Democratic Party (SDP BiH) and the Democratic Front.
The HNS’s positions only deepen the divisions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and hamper the process of post-war reconciliation, the SDA said. “No act of rejection can change the final verdicts of the Hague-based tribunal or historical facts, but it does send a clear and unambiguous message about the policy pursued by the HNS, towards others in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the entire international public,” the biggest Bosniak party said.
The HNS’s call for the administrative and territorial retailoring of Bosnia and Herzegovina based on “the glorification of the joint criminal enterprise” constitutes a conscious effort to obstruct the dialogue necessary to implement the reform of the election system, the SDA said, stressing that HNS leaders had previously demonstrated their attitude to Bosnia and Herzegovina by attending a commemoration of the unconstitutional day of the Bosnian Serb entity on January 9.
The SDP BiH said that the denial of the ICTY rulings was a continuation of “the HDZ’s retrograde policies”, noting that the biggest Croat party was holding Bosnia and Herzegovina citizens hostage to its incorrect interpretations of the country’s constitution and election law.
The DF, the party led by Željko Komšić, the Croat member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, called on representatives of the international community to condemn the HNS’s “uncivilised act of glorification of crimes and denial of court findings.”
The declaration of the HNS BiH, the body that coordinates activities of most Croat political parties in Bosnia and Herzegovina, rejected the ICTY’s findings on the joint criminal enterprise, which, it said, “is attributed to Croatia, the Croat Republic of Herceg-Bosna and the Croatian Defence Council in an unfounded and unfair way”.
“The ill-intentioned assertion is unfortunately used for the accomplishment of wartime goals of one of the formerly warring parties in Bosnia and Herzegovina and for the elimination of the Croat people as a political entity in the country. In the “Prlić and others” case, the ICTY was not qualified, nor is it at all qualified, as it itself ruled in 2007, to decide about the accountability of states because it is a criminal court which prosecutes only individuals,” the HNS said in the declaration, among other things.
More news about the status of Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina can be found in the Diaspora section.
