KOVAČEVIĆ: BILDT AND PETRITSCH STATEMENTS MARK MAJOR SUCCESS OF DODIK'S POLICY

BANJA LUKA, MAY 27 /SRNA/ - Serb delegate in the House of Peoples of the BiH Parliamentary Assembly Radovan Kovačević assessed that statements by former high representatives Carl Bildt and Wolfgang Petritsch, as well as the United States, that the Office of the High Representative /OHR/ should be closed represent confirmation of a major victory for SNSD President Milorad Dodik.

Kovačević noted that the statements by Bildt and Petritsch came a day after the Republika Srpska National Assembly adopted a declaration calling for the closure of the OHR. "They wrote that the Office of the High Representative should be closed, that there should be no discussion at all about who the next High Representative will be, but rather about a new chapter for BiH and domestic representatives taking over decision-making. If we take into account that such a position also exists in the United States, which until now has been the main sponsor and patron of the High Representative, then we must state one very simple thing - that this is a major victory for Milorad Dodik,” Kovačević stated. According to him, Dodik is the only politician who has been advocating this concept for BiH for the past 20 years, while nothing similar could be heard anywhere in Sarajevo. "In the text written by Petritsch and Bildt, they now believe that all the tasks they had imagined regarding the so-called nation-building of BiH, which is impossible and will never happen, should now be transferred to Brussels,” Kovačević noted. He added that Petritsch and Bildt want to abandon the previous approach and create a new one in which Brussels would impose such conditions on BiH, after which, as they put it, BiH would prove whether it belongs in Europe. "We have always been in Europe. Carl Bildt certainly will not determine whether we belong in Europe. Perhaps only some new geographer drawing a new map of Europe could do that. But I do not accept that Carl Bildt is a greater European than me or anyone in Sarajevo, Tuzla, Mostar or anywhere else", Kovačević said.