Croatians Under Islamic Terrorism Attack

It was in July of 2014 when US Congresswoman Janice Hahn submitted to the House of Representatives a resolution demanding that President Barack Obama appoint a special representative for the Balkans and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) of the country’s delays in its Euro-Atlantic path and drew attention to the consistent reduction and erosion of rights of Croats in BiH because of which there’s blockades and a political deadlock. I wrote an article about that.

In the Resolution Congresswoman Hahn had noted that the number of Croats in Bosnia has halved from 820,000 to about 460,000. “It is unacceptable that this negative demographic trend is reflected in the reduction of constitutional rights of Croats in BiH, as that reduction directly causes political and administrative dysfunctionality of the country,” Hahn stated in the resolution.

Hahn recognised the poor functionality of the Federation of BiH entity in which Bosniaks (Muslims) are seen as oppressors of Croats and their constitutional rights and that this dysfunctionality only fuels the separatist tendency of Serbs within the Serbian Republic entity, which of course threatens, as she said, the very integrity of the country (BiH) as a whole.

Despite Hahn’s submission former Democrat US President Obama appears to have done the opposite by distancing the US further from issues affecting BiH, thus enabling in my view further fermentation of Islamic threat to Croats in BiH as well as Europe.

Helsinki Commission Chairman, US Senator Roger Wicker (Republican) on September 12, 2018 urged the United States for greater engagement in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  

In 2021 the situation with obstructing and oppressing Croats’ rights within the Federation of BiH by Muslims (Bosniaks) is by all accounts no better than in 2014 or 2018. In fact, it is becoming worse by the day as pressure to control and rule grows, thus further eroding one of BiH’s constitutional people – Croats. The earned rights through the 1990’s bloody war where defending life was paramount, the given equality rights to all three constitutional people through the 1995 Dayton Agreement have all just about collapsed for Croats under the smothering, evidently nastily power-hungry Muslim or Bosniak counterpart in the Federation.

While the so-called Croat – Muslim conflict that erupted in 1990’s in Bosnia and Herzegovina has (unfairly and devoid of the truth) largely been depicted in the international media (as well as the ICTY) as an attack on Bosnian Muslims one must sit back today and re-look the truth and reality in the eye. That is, it was in no way an attack against Muslims by Croats but it hid the Muslim agenda to take over the country, especially the part that is post-Dayton agreement in 1995, known as Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosniaks and Croats). It is clear that is why the Muslims/Bosniaks sought to employ in the war, on their side, Mujaheddins from North Africa, Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan.   

The foreign Islamic fighters invited by Bosnian Muslims to their battlegrounds as killers, firstly against Serbs then against Croats during the course of the 1992-1995 war, have clearly been reaping their payment for their efforts to help Bosnian Muslims in war all these years since the war ended with the Dayton Agreement. One would be within the realm of absolute truth if one says that such payment was agreed upon in advance, at the start of Mujaheddins’ engagement. Their payment evidently comes in the form of strengthening the Islamic position in Europe while at the same time helping Bosnian Muslims in their abominable building up of superiority over Croats. An example of this is that Muslims rather than Croats elect Croat representatives in the Bosnia and Herzegovina presidency, parliament and people’s assemblies and other places of power. Muslims do not permit Croats to elect their own representatives and only Muslims can elect Muslim or Bosniak representatives (as well as Croat!). All this is happening at the same time as everyone, including Muslims, is saying that all three constitutional peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina, viz. Croats, Muslims and Serbs, are equal and have equal rights! Yet, Croats are denied the basic and constitutionally guaranteed right to elect their own representatives! The Serbs have made sure they have their own entity in BiH, Republika Srpska (Serbian Republic) and the path to that meant genocide and terrible widespread destruction of both Croats and Muslims in BiH. In asserting their rights in accordance with the Dayton Agreement they do not depend nor are they impeded by the Muslims there as far as “the eye” can see.

On March 10, 2021 the Croatian World Congress has released its letter to members of US Congress through which it raises awareness of Nino Raspudic’s (Independent Member of Croatian Parliament; born in Bosnia and Herzegovina) recent speech in the Croatian Parliament with a detailed description of the development of Islamic terrorism in Bosnia and Herzegovina, its connections to the ruling Bosniak-Muslim establishment, and the threats it presents to Croatia and Croatian Christians in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Please access Mr Raspudic’s 12 February 2021 speech with link provided above.

Please distribute both the Croatian World Congress letter and Mr Raspudic’s speech as much as you can.

Please act, write you own or share the Croatian World Congress letter and Mr Nino Raspudic’s speech in Croatian Parliament, 12 February 2021 on the threat of Islamic terrorism against Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Sharing of those can simply be done by sharing this article or downloading the letter and the speech and sharing them independently. It is hoped that many others around the world will write the same or a similar letter as the Croatian World Congress has to their members of Congress and Parliaments. It is our duty to protect the rights of all people and it is, in this case, to be active and make sure the world is aware of the dire position Croats of Bosnia and Herzegovina have been placed in and continue to painful endure under the aggressive Muslim or Bosniak control in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ina Vukic

Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Komsic affair – restored!

Zeljko Komsic
Photo: bljesak.info

Balkan history is replete with examples of how disingenuous political tactics used to establish an ethnic hegemony lead to tragedy. Unfortunately, people who refuse to recognize history’s mistakes are prone to repeating them.

By Gordon N. Bardos/ transcoflict 

Some six years ago, the present author did a mathematical analysis of Bosnia’s 2010 electoral results which showed that the ostensible Croat candidate for the Bosnian state presidency, Zeljko Komsic, had in fact received some 70-80 percent of his votes from Bosniac voters. Two months ago, in a replay of the 2006 and 2010 elections, Komsic again won election to the Bosnian presidency by effectively disenfranchising the vast majority of Croat voters, heralding what is likely to be yet another period of political instability in the country.

To anyone familiar with the history and fate of the two Yugoslavia’s in the 20th century, historical precedent suggests that Komsic’s election under these conditions should be of considerable concern. The disingenuous political manipulation involved in Komsic’s election is nothing new—and unfortunately we have considerable evidence of the consequences such tactics have had in the past. As this year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the first Yugoslav state, it is worth reviewing Komsic’s election from the perspective of how previous such attempts have fared.

Probably unavoidably, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929) that emerged in 1918 from the breakup of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires started out as an administrative extension of the independent pre-war Kingdom of Serbia. This pre-war Serbian kingdom had the moral authority of being on the victorious Allied side, and the organizational advantage of having a fully-developed governmental bureaucracy and military force. Unfortunately, what this pre-war Serbian bureaucracy lacked was the political experience needed to understand that governing a diverse, multiethnic and multi-religious population would be significantly different than governing a largely mono-ethnic and mono-religious Serbian national state.

Thus, almost by default, the post-World War I Yugoslav state simply tried to expand and impose Serbia’s pre-war unitary political system upon the whole of the new South Slavic state. Yet the problem with this strategy, as Ivo Banac noted in his study of the first Yugoslavia’s formation, was that

unitarism was plainly opposed to the reality of Serb, Croat, and Slovene national individuality and moreover in contradiction to the empirically observable fact that these peoples were fully formed national entities of long standing…to ignore the fact that the South Slavs were not one nation, one culture, and one loyalty, or to insist that they could acquire these unitary characteristics in due course, only weakened the already fragile state and diminished the prospects for good-neighborliness based on the rejection of all forms of assimilationism and on respect of Yugoslavia’s multinational character, the only policy that could strengthen the Yugoslav polity…Cooperation was not the aim of political leaders, nor could it be as long as the centralist bloc refused to respect a principle of concurrent majority in each national community…A pretense was made that such parties as the Democratic Party were ‘multitribal,’ though in fact the Croat and Slovene Democrats had no stable support in their communities. Yugoslavia was indeed a highly diversified multinational state, but multinationalism could not promote consociationalism while the national ideologies of the principal group encouraged the notion that domination through assimilation was imminent.

Given these ideological blinders, in the first Yugoslavia neither multi-party democracy nor royal dictatorship could develop a framework for a united state which at the same time satisfied the legitimate interests of Yugoslavia’s various ethnic groups to autonomy and self-governance. After some two decades of chronic instability, the outbreak of World War II provided the final nail in the first Yugoslavia’s coffin.

Tragically, during World War II these problems came back to haunt the South Slavs in the form of the fratricidal civil war which afflicted Yugoslavia from 1941-45. Josip Broz Tito’s communist movement emerged victorious from the bloodbath, due in no small part to the fact that it was perhaps alone in formulating a political platform able to attract at least a modicum of support from amongst Yugoslavia’s various peoples.

One of the most important pillars of this platform was the creation of an ethno-federal system, and an implicit acceptance of the political equality of Yugoslavia’s constituent peoples, regardless of size (the implicit acceptance would become more explicit as time went on). For many academic specialists of Tito’s Yugoslavia, this was in fact the key reason for the Partisan movement’s successes; Susan Woodward, for instance, has claimed that “the commitment to recognize the separate existence of Yugoslav nations and their sovereign rights was critical to the communist victory after 1943.”

Nowhere was this more critical than in Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH), where the famous 1943 declaration of the Anti-Fascist Resistance Council of BiH (local acronym: ZAVNOBiH) claimed that Bosnia was “neither Serbian nor Croatian nor Muslim…but Serbian and Muslim and Croatian,” thereby explicitly endorsing the concept that all three ethnic groups were equal constituent peoples in BiH.

Yet even though the Yugoslav communists were more astute politically when it came to dealing with Yugoslavia’s national question, they too failed to find a formula to resolve it, just as the Habsburgs and the Royal Yugoslav government had failed before them. By the 1960s, for instance, Dennison Rusinow would claim that

the tendency to subsume all other questions and conflicts to the national one and to interpret and simplify every issue in national terms, reminiscent of old Yugoslavia and of the Habsburg monarchy before it, was again becoming nearly universal.

Indeed, as time went on, the main Marxist theoretician in the Yugoslav communist leadership, Eduard Kardelj, became more and more pessimistic about resolving the problem. By the 1960s Kardelj would claim

We have up until now tried everything possible to maintain Yugoslavia; first it was a unitary state, then it became a federation, and now we are moving towards a confederation. If even that does not succeed, then it only remains for us to admit that the Comintern was right when it claimed that Yugoslavia was an artificial creation and that we—Yugoslav communists—had made a mistake.

With Tito’s death in 1980, the terminal stage of Yugoslavia’s disintegration began. Although the country’s collapse was caused by multiple phenomenon (both domestic and international), one of these most certainly was Slobodan Milošević attempt in the latter half of the decade to impose his own designated leaders in Kosovo, Montenegro and Vojvodina, all in an attempt to build an artificial majority coalition for his chosen vision of a more centralized, unitary Yugoslav future. Predictably, the leaders of Yugoslavia’s other republics/ethnic groups objected. As Slovenian president Milan Kučan argued, “Can the imposition of majority decisionmaking in a multinational community by those who are the most numerous be anything else but the violation of the principle of the equality of nations, the negation of its sovereignty and therefore the right to autonomous decisionmaking…? “ The rest, as they say, is history.

Just as it had in the two Yugoslavia’s, disagreements over the principle of the equality of nations in a multi-ethnic state plagued Bosnia & Herzegovina from its beginnings as well. In 1991-1992 Bosnia’s Serbs justified their rebellion in part on the argument that their equal rights as a constituent nation in BiH were being violated by the outvoting of the Croat-Muslim coalition in Bosnia.

Resolving this issue would plague peace negotiators for the duration of the war; indeed, one of the prerequisites for ending the Bosnian war was for international negotiators to reconcile themselves to the necessity of applying federal and consociational principles to any post-war settlement. As the late Richard Holbrooke once noted,

Bosnia is a federal state. It has to be structured as a federal state. You cannot have a unitary government, because then the country would go back into fighting. And that’s the reason that the Dayton agreement has been probably the most successful peace agreement in the world in the last generation, because it recognized the reality.

Somewhere over the past few years, however, a new concept has crept into Bosnian politics, which Ivan Lovrenovic has described as an “epochal precedent”: a renunciation of the ZAVNOHBiH idea that Bosnia & Herzegovina was “Serbian and Muslim and Croatian, which excluded the idea the criteria of majority and minorities in governing, in claiming to have greater rights,” in favor of the notion that there is now a political majority and political minorities in BiH. Entirely predictably, the unilateral abandonment of the ZAVNOHBiH principles has thrown Bosnian politics into chaos.

Numerous motivations are driving this policy. Islamist elements in the country have for decades wanted an unchallengeable unitarist order in the country. As Alija Izetbegovic demanded some forty years ago

There exists one order, one dynamic, one well-being, one progress which can be built on this land and in this region, but that is not the order, progress and well-being of Europe and America…the Islamic movement can and must move towards taking power as soon as it is morally and numerically strong enough so that it can not only destroy the existing non-Islamic [order], but build a new Islamic power.

While Bosnia’s secular unitarists have a different metaphysical inspiration, the end result is largely the same. Unfortunately, few international observers have been keen enough to recognize this. Among the rare few has been Sumantra Bose, who once correctly noted that many of “the strongest opponents of diffusion of political authority and sharing of power [manifested in the Dayton Peace Accords] are very often deeply illiberal elements—ethnic majoritarian nationalists . . . who sometimes try to obscure their real agenda, centralization and domination, by invoking the principle of equality of all citizens regardless of ethnicity or nationality.” Bose would also note,

The shrill protests of many (not all) Bosnian and foreign integrationist revisionists against the Dayton settlement are inspired, in fact, not by a value-based commitment to a multi-national, civic, society but by a desire for a less decentralized, more unitary state which will put the disobedient and disloyal Bosnian Serbs (and to a lesser extent, the intransigent BiH Croats) in their place. The underlying motive is to settle accounts from the war, rather than build a forward-looking vision and strategy for the reconstruction of Bosnia & Herzegovina in the overall context of the Yugoslav region.

Somewhat ironically, although the advocates of this policy claim to be civic non-nationalists who reject “constructed” ethnic categories, they either do not understand or do not care about the intellectual contradiction at the heart of their own argument—that dividing ethnic groups into permanent political majorities and minorities does not break down ethnic identities and allegiances, it reifies and reinforces them.

Moreover, given the realities of contemporary Bosnia, what the unitarists are actually trying to impose is not a civic, non-national state and society, but a form of internal colonialism in which one group of people in one part of the country is allowed to establish political domination over other groups of people in other parts of the country.

While Komsic claims he has the understanding of the American ambassador in Sarajevo and the High Representative, most reasonable people agree that in a complex multiethnic country such policies are detrimental. As far back as September 2006, for instance, Haris Silajdzic explained the obvious to Komsic,

I believe that if we live in a system of ethnic representation and if the Bosniacs choose the Bosniac representative, and the Serbs the Serb representative, that it is not just towards the Croats that someone chooses their representative on their behalf. I believe that that is dangerous for BiH…and that will cause citizens of Croat nationality to feel revulsion towards BiH. And that could lead the Croats to ask for a third entity.

Other prominent public figures in Bosnia have voiced similar concerns. Senad Hadzifejzovic once noted that Sarajevo’s imposition of Komsic on the Croats was akin to the HDZ trying to impose the rebel leader Fikret Abdic on the Bosniac electorate, while Muhamed Filipovic has said that if Komsic had any morals he never would have even presented himself as a candidate. Meanwhile, scholars such as Mile Lasić and Sacir Filandra have argued that the unitarist nationalism Komsic represents was as dangerous to Bosnia & Herzegovina as Croat and Serb separatist nationalism.

Even individuals whose political opinions on most things are diametrically opposed have expressed similar views on this issue. On the eve of BiH’s October elections the leader of the Islamic Community of Bosnia & Herzegovina, Husein Kavazovic, explicitly stated that “I do not consider it good that the members of one people choose the representatives of another people,” while Milorad Dodik, for his part, warned that others should not make the same mistake the Serbs made in Yugoslavia. The prominent Sarajevo commentator Nedzad Latic has perhaps been most dire of all, warning that the political games Komsic and his followers are playing were “leading Bosnia to hell.”

To conclude, it is worth going back to the quote by Ivo Banac cited at the beginning of this piece. Banac’s description on the problems facing the first Yugoslavia was written in 1980s to describe what had taken place some six decades earlier. An interesting thought experiment, however, is to take what Banac wrote in the 1980s, and, by changing tenses and a few nouns and adjectives, see how his words apply today, some forty years later. What we get is the following:

…unitarism is plainly opposed to the reality of Bosniac, Croat, and Serb national individuality and moreover in contradiction to the empirically observable fact that these peoples are fully formed national entities of long standing…To act as if this is not the case, to ignore the fact that the peoples of Bosnia & Herzegovina are not one nation, one culture, and one loyalty, or to insist that they can acquire these unitary characteristics in due course, only weakens the already fragile state and diminishes the prospects for good-neighborliness based on the rejection of all forms of assimilationism and on respect of Bosnia & Herzegovina’s multinational character, the only policy that can strengthen the Bosnian polity…Cooperation is not the aim of political leaders, nor can it be as long as the centralist bloc refuses to respect a principle of concurrent majority in each national community. Instead, the centralists seek to impose a patchwork majority, consisting of Bosniac parties and their tactical allies, onto the parties that represent most of the non-Bosniac groups. A pretense is made that such parties as the Democratic Front are “multitribal,” though in fact the Croat and Serb Democrats have no stable support in their communities. Bosnia & Herzegovina is indeed a highly diversified multinational state, but multinationalism cannot promote consociationalism while the national ideology of the principal group encourages the notion that domination through assimilation is imminent.”

As the French might put it, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

Balkan history is replete with examples of how disingenuous political tactics used to establish an ethnic hegemony lead to tragedy. Unfortunately, people who refuse to recognize history’s mistakes are prone to repeating them.

(Gordon N. Bardos is president of SEERECON, a political risk and strategic consultancy specializing in Southeastern Europe)

Croats In Bosnia And Herzegovina – Victims Of Dayton Agreement

Message from Bishops of Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, “Dayton Agreement has not brought peace and justice” – May 2017

 

Joint statement
Of the Members of the Commission “Justitia et pax”
Bishops’ Conferences of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Croatia and Slovenian Bishops’ Conference

Members of the Commission “Justitia et pax” of the Bishop’s conference (BK) BiH gathered on 6th of May 2017. in the center of the Banja Luka’s Diocese to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the Commission. The members of the same commissions of the Croatian and Slovenian Bishops’ Conferences (HBK and SŠK) joined them. A special guest also attended the “jubilee” session: Cardinal Peter Turkson, longtime President of the Pontifical Council “Justitia et pax”, and now president of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, the newly appointed body of the Holy See.

From their common session, the participants give out to the church and general public the following

 

STATEMENT
In the spirit of the Apostolic Constitution Pastor Bonus of Pope St. John Paul II, The „Justitia et Pax“ Commission (Justice and Peace) of the BK of BiH strive to – among other:

• Promote justice and peace in the area of the BK of BiH according to the principles of the Evangelical and Church social sciences;
• collect news and results of research on justice and peace, on people’s progress and on human rights violations, and then to evaluate and present to the public the conclusions;
• to cherish the relations with Catholic associations and other institutions, as well as outside the Catholic Church, who are genuinely interested in achieving justice and peace in the world;
• Maintain special relations with the Pontifical Council „Justitia et pax“, that is with the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.

Since its beginning, the Commission is a member of the Conference of European Commissions „Justitia et pax“.

I. The bishops of Bosnia and Herzegovina, even before the founding of the Commission “Justitita et pax” – in the spirit of the Gospel and the social sciences of the Catholic Church, consistent with the Church’s attitudes regarding war and peace many times – together and individually – appealed and urged that the war should not start, to stop the imposed war and to establish just and lasting peace for all the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina. They have always been committed to the fundamental human and civil rights and liberties of all nations and faiths. They raised their voices firmly against all sorts of war and post war crimes and violence – that was done to people not minding if the people were Catholics or non-Catholics.

Bishops, during the war (1992-1995) in their numerous appeals to domestic and international politicians, made it clear that they did not agree to any alteration of the boundaries of their dioceses nor to the disappearance from these territories of mostly Croat people and the Catholic Church, that has always been and stayed for centuries the most loyal parent and patron”.

They continued to do so after the war as well.

In their statement from 29 January 1995, the bishops also wrote:
“We are deeply saddened by the unacceptable oversight of the International Political Community, which showed an incomprehensible concession to aggression and „force of strength“, and indifference to the people suffering from unequal injustices, violence, demolitions and slaughter… We are astonished and wondering whether political interests and prestige are more endlessly important than humans, people and nations who are without any guilt being put in front of genocidal extermination after so many centuries of their national survival, religious practice of “cultural openness to all in this region”?

In their letter to High Representative Carlos Westendorp on 4th of December 1998, they were also very clear and consistent:

“We seek realization of the right to a safe return and a life worthy of human in its own property and in its own homeland, not only for members of his Catholic community who wish to return but also for members of every other religious community or ethnic group.”

The bishops of BiH also, ten years after the war (29th of October 2005), yet again, publicly warned that the Dayton Peace Agreement becomes a permanent source of instability and as that a threat to peace, and that it brought most damage to the members of domicile Croatian people, that is the Catholic church:

“Even though they are the least numerous and the largest victims of war, 67% of them have fled, and only 13% of them returned by now (2005), Croats are also victims of the Dayton Agreement, because as the constitutive people they have no rights as minorities as well. As the eldest nation in BiH, they only seek to be equalized in the rights and duties of the two other nations in that country. ”

Also during the next 10-12 years, the bishops of BK BiH in their numerous public performances critically but cautiously warned of imposing and controlled chaos in the unfairly organized, dysfunctional and overwhelming state creation, where it was not possible to secure or assure needed progress and a safer future for all nations and citizens of BIH.

To such a consistent and principled attitude, they were obliged by the guiding words of Pope St. John Paul II, said in Sarajevo on April 13th 1997, by which they are as bishops “obliged to warn against violence, to put an end to injustice, to address evil by its proper name and with all legitimate means defend their communities”.

 

II. In the spirit of clear and consistent warnings and allegations by Bishops of BK BiH of numerous shortcomings in the basic arrangements of the state of BiH and the selectivity and inconsistencies in the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement during the period of more than twenty years, the Commission “Justitia et pax” of the same Bishops’ Conference also spoke up.

In its numerous reports, the Commission was:
• Clearly noting and explaining the causes of the constant state of disempowerment of citizens and people in BiH;
• Proposing concrete solutions;
• appealing to all relevant domestic and international political factors for a rooted change in the existing unsatisfactory social and political state in the country;
• continuously pointing out that one of the main sources of disempowerment of citizens and nations in BiH is undemocratic, irrational and dysfunctional organization of the multiethnic state of BiH, which is all the bitter fruit of the unethical solutions imposed by the Dayton Peace Agreement.

The Commission has repeatedly in their annual reports pointed out that Annex 4 of the Dayton Peace Agreement as the Constitution of BiH was not legitimate because its signatories were not democratically elected by the citizens of BiH and its constitutive nations. It is not legitimate considering that as an international agreement it has never been ratified in the Assembly of BiH or endorsed by the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Commission has repeatedly pointed out to the fact that the said Agreement stopped blood spills but did not bring justice and righteousness to all the people of the country, but a permanent political conflict between domestic parties and politicians. This conflict that makes the state of BiH more and more unstable and non-perspective, is threatening indirectly the neighboring countries as well.

In recent years, the Commission has repeatedly warned in its repeated statements for public which addressed all responsible domestic and international officials in an increasingly dramatic situation – of the deconstructed domicile Croatian people. Nowadays (22 years after the war) according to church statistics, the Croatian people are, in the whole country, more than 45% of its pre-war number gone. In almost half of the country – in the RS entity – due to thorough ethnic cleansing and disabling the sustainable return of the exiled Catholic population, more than 90% never returned.

Over the past years, the Commission has often called for the consistent and strict application of Annex 7 of the Dayton Peace Agreement to create all refugees and displaced persons the conditions for a safe and sustainable return. It is generally known that in all previous donor and rebuilding actions the least aid was given to the Croatians (3%!), especially Croats in the RS area, where the results of their sustainable return are devastating. We have stressed that without sustainable return, of the refugees who are still willing to return, the justice will not be satisfied and the reconciliation between people will not be made. The war, which exiled hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens from their homes, destroyed their lives and properties, was a country or countries project. Therefore, the restoration of a house, the return, the creation of conditions for normal life should also be the project of a country or countries. Therefore, the Commission considered and still considers that nobody, in the name of any of their goals, has the right to declare the return of refugees and displaced persons completed until Annex 7 of the Dayton Peace Agreement is implemented and until the exiled Croats – Catholics do not receive the same conditions as the others for their sustainable return.

Apart from the painful and dramatic fact of the physical extermination of the domestic Croat – Catholic people, the Commission has repeatedly warned officials and the general public also of completely erasing of their cultural, ethnic and political identifications and terminology – from deleting them in their home offices to changing street’s names, suppressing cultural societies and religious institutions.

They also warned of the fatal disregard of a large number of Croat’s representatives in the legislative and executive authorities on the level of the entire country, and in particular of the RS entity, for the survival of the Croat people in their own homeland and for the necessary financial assistance to the few Croat Catholics who, even with many problems, managed to stay in their hometowns, or they were, with great obstacles, able to return, where they had been forced out from.

With such behavior, these political representatives of the Croatian people agreed to legalize the violent persecution and extermination of the people in the great part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and this way the definitive disappearance of the Catholic Church in those areas.
The Commission repeated the words of the Bishops of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Bishops of the Republic of Croatia from 1993, with which they jointly stressed that they cannot “reconcile with any political solution to the future of the wounded country (BiH), which would lawfully allow destruction of more than half of the members and the properties of the Catholic Church and the Croatian people in the Republic of BiH. This would virtually extinguish two Catholic dioceses in Europe”.
The Commission encouraged all responsible authorities to be more determent and jointly agree on the organization of the country with the guarantee of all basic and civil rights and freedoms, personal and collective in all parts of the country. They warned that partial and short-term solutions of the country’s regulation would continue to create new injustices and not only question the further survival of the state of BiH, but also of the domicile people in some of its current parts.

 

III. The Catholic Church in these parts, in the past and present, fearlessly and consistently defended man’s dignity, his religion and fundamental human rights.

The public knows that in such Bosnian-Herzegovinian relations, domicile Croats and Catholics do not have the same opportunities to participate in public information that prevents the creation of a true public image of the situation and problems of Croatians and Catholics in BiH. It is commonly shown in the public that everyone else in the country has more problems than Croats. When it is reported of problems of Croats and Catholics, it is done in a sensationalist and non-objective way, which makes perception of Croats misleading, they are seen as the burden of Bosnia and Herzegovina and as a disturbance factor in it.

This time again we repeat our moral judgement – on which we have the right – as Christians and as citizens – that to all citizens of ours for far too long crushed country – and thus the local Catholics must have the right to build their future, just like in every other modern European prosper and functional legalized country, which has been disrupted during all the years after the war.

This time again the Commission repeats the bitter and dramatic fact that Catholics in BiH today are physically the most vulnerable part of the Catholic Church on the entire European continent.

We are witnessing the continuation – even increase of the uncertainty of the physical survival of the Catholic Church in Bosnia and Herzegovina, despite the tirelessly efforts of the Church’s leadership that in this politically and legally disordered country becomes a truly needed fair and lasting peace factor.

The Commission warns again that in BiH unjust legalization of crimes committed in the 1992-1995 war continues, as well as political turmoil, conflict and general social insecurity, making the return of displaced persons unable, preventing employment, especially among many young people, increasing the instability of numerous families, and affective and social separation of the whole communities.

The Commission yet again encourages all those responsible to step up their approach to rooted constitutional changes of the entire BiH society principled on federalism, decentralization, subsidiarity and legitimate representation of its constitutive people and national minorities.

The Commission calls on the international community representatives in BiH to provide more effective political, legal and material aid for the establishment of real equality across the country among members of the three constitutive people – Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats.

The Commission joins this time again to all those who are struggling to make the final adaptation of the Constitution – one for the whole country – instead of the current four different ones.

 

IV. Bosnia and Herzegovina, as the „semi protected issue“ of the International Community, that same International Community –has unfortunately left it throughout all the post war years to be a „place of insecurity“ instead of a peace zone. Every human being, and especially a politician, is certainly clear that maintenance of such a „controlled chaos“ in BiH is a latent danger not only for a stable peace in this part of Europe but also for world peace.

Therefore the „Report“ from the Europen Parliament from February 15th 2017., which expresses more willingness to more effectively assist the state of BiH in the process of stabilization and joining with European structures than in previous years is welcomed and supported.

The „Justitia et pax“ Commission of BK BiH, together with the Croatian BK Commission and the Slovenian BK Commission, expresses gratitude to European politicians, especially from Croatia and Slovenia, for their valuable contribution to the preparation and adoption of this document of international character, based on which we hope – will be ultimately more efficient to work on regulating BiH as a legal, safe and prosperous country for all its citizens, ethnic and religious communities, and especially the disenfranchised Catholic population in it.

We are grateful, especially to the Holy Father and to the Holy See for all the valuable care and support for the life and the work of the Catholic Church in this country – in particular its shepherds – for truth, justice, equality, forgiveness, reconciliation and just Peace for all citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Stanislav Zore,
Archbishop of Ljubljana, metropolit,
President of Commision „Justitia et pax“ SŠK
Vjekoslav Huzjak,
Bishop of Bjelovar-Križevci,
President of Commision „Justia et pax“ HBK
Franjo Komarica,
Bishop of Banja Luka,
President of Commision „Justitia et Pax“ BKBiH

 

 

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