Bosnia and Herzegovina's Presidency chair, Zeljko Komsic, on Tuesday accused neighboring countries of "interfering in Bosnia's internal affairs" and of "supporting concepts that consolidate ethnic divisions in order to keep control of Bosnia and Herzegovina's key resources."

Komsic said this before the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly in Strasbourg, speaking via video link from Sarajevo after being diagnosed with Covid-19.

As for neighboring countries, which he did not name, Komsic said that they “make incursions into Bosnia and Herzegovina’s political system” and try to control its resources by using their satellites in the country. He said this was evidenced by the fact that the issue of the country’s land and sea borders remained outstanding, a clear allusion to Croatia and Serbia.

“The neighboring countries negate the Bosnia and Herzegovina nation by using ethnic identities in my country to their benefit,” Komsic said, among other things, calling on the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly to oppose demands for changing the country’s election law to consolidate the concept of constituent ethnic groups and to support solutions that would consolidate the role of citizen-individual as the holder of sovereignty.

Komsic said that a system based on ethnicity in reality leads to the establishment of three totalitarian ethnic systems, which is only a pretext for resource control.

He said that Bosnia and Herzegovina’s current constitution, imposed with the Dayton peace agreement, should have been reformed long ago but not in a way to further strengthen ethnic divisions but rather eliminate them, just as the concept of ethnic voting i.e. mechanisms enabling a minority to block the will of the political majority in Bosnia and Herzegovina through the parliamentary Houses of Peoples, should have been eliminated.

Komsic claims that the most important issue is the implementation of five rulings of the European Court of Human Rights that have established that BiH citizens are discriminated against based on their ethnicity or place of residence and notes that this cannot be resolved by establishing a new election system that would result in even more discrimination because votes would not have the same weight.

He accused the neighboring countries of supporting such discriminatory solutions in order to get their “war goals” achieved.

“There are two aspects to their plans. The first is to create, through constitutional changes and changes to the election law, such a system in Bosnia and Herzegovina that will give them a final say in the adoption of any decision in Bosnia and Herzegovina and thus full control of my country. Such plans are easy to recognise every time they speak of the constituent peoples or when they say that they will accept anything the thre ethnic groups agree on,” Komsic said, calling on the Council of Europe to withhold support for such plans and refuse any talks on them.