FIRM SUPPORT FOR THE DAYTON PEACE AGREEMENT AND BiH CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER

BANJA LUKA, MAY 3 /SRNA/ - Republika Srpska continues to support the Dayton Peace Agreement and insists on the consistent application of its original text, which includes support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of BiH, as well as the BiH Constitution, and has absolutely no plan to secede from BiH, pointed out the 33rd Republika Srpska Report to the UN Security Council.

This document reads that Republika Srpska only seeks to return the competences that belong to it according to the clear provisions of the BiH Constitution, rightly demanding that other politicians in BiH, as well as foreign governments, respect international obligations of the Dayton Peace Agreement and act in the direction of its implementation. "Republika Srpska believes that the current political crisis in BiH can only be resolved through talks, in good faith, between the leading political representatives of all three constituent peoples, whereby the basis of negotiations must be the acceptance of the Dayton Peace Agreement, including the Constitution of BiH," adds the Report, which the Republika Srpska Government adopted. It is emphasized that Republika Srpska is ready for such a conversation to begin immediately without delay, welcoming the help of BiH's partners from the international community to reach it. The first portion of the Report emphasizes that Republika Srpska's continued support for the Dayton Peace Agreement also refers to its unwavering commitment to resolve all political issues in BiH exclusively peacefully. "Republika Srpska and its leadership resolutely call for peace and exclude any use of violence. Republika Srpska also closely cooperates with the EU EUFOR ALTHEA mission in BiH, even supporting the increasing number of members of this force in order to provide the BiH citizens with additional assurance that peace in the country will not be threatened," the Report points out. The document notes that in the decades after the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement until today, successive high representatives, with the support of Bosniak political parties, have led a continuous campaign with the aim of destroying the Dayton-based compromise and achieving the Bosniak war goal - a unitary state under the domination of Bosniaks, which is managed from Sarajevo. In order to achieve these goals, the high representatives, without any legal basis and contrary to the most basic principles of international law, rejected the democratic constitutional order of BiH and governed the state through autocratic decisions, without any control. "Judiciary institutions in BiH, which are supposed to be guardians of the rule of law, are under the influence of external stakeholders and persistently ignore the obvious unconstitutionality of ruling the decisions and the centralization of jurisdiction in Sarajevo," the Report states. Srpska reminds that the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995 ended the war in BiH and established a democratic constitutional structure, which was set up in such a way that each of the three previously warring constituent peoples of BiH - Bosniaks, predominantly Muslims, Serbs, predominantly Orthodox Christians, and Croats, predominantly Roman Catholics - instills confidence that they will not fall under the domination of one or more other peoples. It also notes that during the war in BiH, the Bosniaks tried to establish a centralized state without entities and mechanisms protecting constituent peoples, while the Serbs fought for independence. "The Dayton compromise, although failing to fully fulfill the aspirations of any nation, nevertheless established - through Annex 4, which defined the Constitution of BiH - a federal and consociational structure that enabled sustainable peace and a functional community of three peoples, among whom there is still deep mutual distrust," the Report added. This document emphasizes the Constitution achieved this by giving all competences, except for a few precisely mentioned, to the entities and introducing consociational mechanisms, such as the three-member Presidency, which protect the interests of all constituent peoples individually.