Haris Silajdzic Says Powers that Split Bosnia
Incapable of Putting it Back Together
(ZAGREB, March 13—Reuters) Former Bosnian prime minister Haris Silajdzic said in an interview published on Wednesday the Muslim-Croat Federation was at risk because its ruling parties were the same ones which tried to dismember Bosnia in war. Western analysts say the federation, main pillar of the Dayton peace accords on Bosnia, is being torn by power struggles between nationalist Croats and Muslims bent on ethnic self-rule in pockets around the country.
Silajdzic, a moderate Muslim committed to reviving Bosnia's multi-ethnic heritage, resigned as premier in January after falling out with the ruling SDA party's post-war drift towards Islamic nationalism. He plans to form an integrationist opposition party and run against Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic's SDA in the country's first post-war elections expected later this year.
Silajdzic said the federation was decaying into separate Muslim and Croat entities unintended by U.S. diplomats who the accord because the SDA and Croat HDZ parties were inclined to divide, not unite, peoples. He was quoted by a weekly newspaper as saying the HDZ, the ethnic nationalist ruling party in Croatia which sponsored the creation of a Croat breakaway entity in Bosnia during the war, was clinging to it in violation of the federation.
Now the SDA was bent on a Muslim-dominated state although this would isolate them from the outside world, Silajdzic told the Croatian independent newspaper Globus. "Relations between (Muslim and Croat ruling parties) are not based on sincerity. It's clear that the same people who were dismembering Bosnia during the war with a strategy of partition cannot put it back together," he said.
"When we speak of hypocrisy look at the federation—we have been talking about (implementing) it for two years but it's still not there," Silajdzic said. "I hope the elections will flush them (nationalist parties) away, because they cannot prosper in peace—they are fed by war and war is what they want. That is why I propose an alliance of democratic forces in Bosnia and Croatia to establish cooperation and bring our peoples closer together."
NATO peace force officers report growing Muslim-Croat tensions in the capital Sarajevo, Bosnia's main western city Mostar and the Lasva river valley in central Bosnia. Mostar and the Lasva valley were the worst battlegrounds of Bosnia's brutal Muslim-Croat war in 1993-94.
Sarajevo's Muslim mayor resigned on Tuesday after the SDA party formed a city government structure without full participation from the Croat minority represented by HDZ. Some Croat police were intimidated and excluded by Muslim officials from participating in a federation police force when it took control on Tuesday of a Sarajevo suburb relinquished by Serb forces under the Dayton accord.
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