Bosnian community leaders to meet

Leaders of the three main political parties in Bosnia-Herzegovina are due to discuss the increasingly fraught political situation in the country next week.

Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) leader Dragan Čović proposed the meeting with his counterparts in the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) and Party of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD), Sulejman Tihić and Milorad Dodik.

Čović told Sarajevo daily Dnevni Avaz that Tihić and Dodik had confirmed their attendance, though the time and date of the meeting has yet to be decided.

He said that “the only solution is to sit down again at the table and to agree.”

“The goal of the meeting is to settle things down a bit. We have a lot of responsibility and we have to rise above trivial matters. Because, everything we’ve been doing in the last five or six months has been ill-advised. We must reach a framework of normal behavior that safeguards the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” said the HDZ leader.

At the first meeting, he said, it was necessary to find an answer to the question: “Are we ready to sit down again and reach an agreement, rather than each of us to retreat back into our own parties?”

Without candid talks, Čović warned, there could be no talk of reform in the country, nor changes to the Constitution.