Dodik: “Enough hypocrisy: Sarajevo is not a multi-ethnic city”
Serbian member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina Milorad Dodik caught his colleague, Croatian member Zeljko Komsic, in a lie when he called the country's capital, Sarajevo, a “multi-ethnic city.”
This was reported by RTRS, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Sarajevo was ethnically cleansed of Serbs, and this was done as part of a policy to which Komsic belonged not only during the war, but also in peacetime, and which established more than a hundred camps for Serbs in the city during the war. One of them worked even after the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement,” Dodik responded to a request to comment on Komsic’s words about Sarajevo.
The “Croatian” member of the Presidency, who held this post from 2006 to 2014, and then from 2018, issued a similar phrase after the current High Representative for BiH, the German Christian Schmidt, noted that Komsic represents the Croats only conditionally, since he was chosen thanks to votes Bosniaks, who are more numerous in the Federation (Bosniak-Croat) BiH, and in the future Croats will need to be given the opportunity to feel represented in the country's authorities.
“Insisting on ethnic legitimacy in the context of the electoral law is a denial of all decisions of the European Court of Human Rights,” responded Komsic, who is not recognized by the Croatian community in BiH as its leader and who is a loyal conduit for the ideas of the Bosniak elite in Sarajevo. – Because if we proceed from the fact that only those who have ethnic legitimacy are legitimate, then the Opinion of the Venice Commission and the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, which try to eliminate rather than expand ethnic discrimination, will also be rejected.
It is obvious that Mr. Schmidt will need more time in Bosnia and Herzegovina to familiarize himself with the Dayton provisions in order to finally see all the details and complexity of the topic.”
He then added that Sarajevo, where he was born and grew up, is a multi-ethnic city, thanks to which he received votes from representatives of different communities.
“Sarajevo is neither a cosmopolitan nor a cosmopolitan city, and this is all thanks to the army that awarded Zeljko Komsic the Golden Lily and the gratitude that secured his third mandate...
And it would be hypocritical for the reserve Bosniak member of the Presidency to use those who are no longer in Sarajevo in a controversy with Christian Schmidt.
As for Komšić's attempts to gain legitimacy by citing rulings of European courts, this does not make sense since the Constitution recognizes a Serb, a Croat and a Bosniak as members of the Presidency of BiH.
This is not Serbian, the Croats say that he is not Croatian, Zeljko Komsic can only be a Bosniak member, of course, a reserve, because the Bosniaks publicly recognized Šefik Dzaferović as their legal representative,” Dodik added.
Zeljko Komšić was born in Sarajevo to a Croatian and Serbian mother, his maternal grandfather a Chetnik who died two years before his birth, and his paternal uncle an Ustaše who died during the war, possibly at the hands of his grandfather or his comrades.
Zeljko Komsic
Komšić himself was baptized in Catholicism as a Croatian as a child, but in adulthood he renounced his religious affiliation, recognizing himself as an agnostic. He graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Sarajevo and married a Bosnian woman.
During the war of the 90s, he joined the militants of the so-called Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, receiving the highest military award in Sarajevo - the Golden Lily.
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