"Croatian President Zoran Milanovic said that the talks on electoral reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina had failed because of Bosniak attempts to unitarise the country, adding that there could be no justification for holding elections that would not ensure legitimate representation of the Croats," state agency Hina said on Monday.

“Unless the Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina are ensured legitimate representation through elections, such elections have no political or democratic justification,” Milanović said in a written statement carried by the Mostar-based news website Dnevnik.

Another round of US- and EU-mediated talks on electoral reform between the Bosnian Croat and Bosniak parties failed on Sunday. The leader of the Croat HDZ BiH party, Dragan Covic, blamed it on the head of the predominantly Bosniak Party of Democratic Action (SDA), Bakir Izetbegovic, who in turn said that the HDZ leader was “provoking the Bosniaks”.

Milanovic said that the failure of the talks was the result of ignorance of the substance of the Dayton peace agreement, failure to respect the equality of the country’s three constituent peoples, and refusal to accept the legitimate representation of the Croats in state bodies.

“Through their political activity, and in recent months by systematically destroying any possible compromise or agreement on amending the election law, they are actually working on the unitarisation of Bosnia and Herzegovina” to the country’s detriment, Milanovic said.

Croatian politicians consider attempts at unitarisation of the country by the Bosniak parties to be equally harmful to Bosnia and Herzegovina as secessionist moves by the Bosnian Serb parties.

General elections are due in October this year, but Croatian officials from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina believe there is no legal basis for that because parts of the election law have been contested by the Bosnia and Herzegovina Constitutional Court.