The Croatian Heritage Foundation marked its 70th anniversary at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb on Friday, with President Zoran Milanovic calling for unity on the status of Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In his address, the president called for unity on key matters, saying that today one of them, to a certain extent, was the status of Croats in BiH.

“Their homeland is BiH as it was designed 26 years ago by an international agreement which was signed by Croatia and which it will honour in good faith.”

Milanovic said there was a big chance to position Croatia among the most advanced states in Europe, “there where it never was but where it belongs.”

He said the Croatian nation had been a dream whose realisation depended on “a few good, right people” who gathered around that idea at a certain moment in history.

The Croatian Heritage Foundation is an institution representing a “firm and safe bridge to the homeland” for about 3.5 million Croats and their descendants around the world, it was said at the event.

The deputy speaker of the BiH Parliament’s House of Peoples, Dragan Covic, thanked Milanovic for “speaking very loudly these days about the role of the Croat people in BiH.”

“We are proud to have Croatia as our homeland, but we won’t renounce BiH as our homeland either. There’s 15% of us in BiH, but as the least numerous, we are the most industrious. We are the leaders of all positive integration processes in BiH,” Covic said.

He thanked Croatia’s officials for encouraging Croats in BiH to preserve their equality as a constituent people and ensure legitimate representation at all government levels.

The Croatian prime minister’s envoy, Zvonko Milas, underlined the importance of focusing on the young as a guarantee of the survival of the relationship between Croats in Croatia and abroad.

The Croatian parliament speaker’s envoy, Zdravka Busic, said the communist authorities had declared the Croatian Heritage Foundation a hotbed of nationalism for connecting Croats in Croatia and abroad and eliminated its leaders from the Croatian people’s political and public spheres in Croatia and abroad.

“Today the Foundation realises about 60 programmes and events, connecting 45 countries on all continents where Croats and citizens of Croatian descent live in larger numbers,” its director Mijo Maric said, calling on young people of Croatian descent from around the world to attend the Foundation’s Croatian language, history, culture and folklore seminars this summer.