Serbian MFA: Becirovic misused commemorative event, no "Greater Serbia" declarations

BELGRADE - In a reaction to accusations levelled against Serbia by Bosnia and Herzegovina Presidency Chairman Denis Becirovic, the Serbian MFA said on Thursday Becirovic had used a commemorative event to promote his anti-Serb programme, rather than to help reconciliation or enhance internal cohesion and political dialogue within his own country.

In a statement, the MFA said Becirovic - the Bosniak member of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Presidency - spoke with only the country's Bosniak population in mind and saw the other two constitutive peoples as some kind of foreign body and a destabilising factor.

"To him, the political will of Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is guaranteed by the Dayton Agreement and the constitution of that country, is not relevant at all, and he interprets any special trait of Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina or any specific character of their political interests as a threat, even though the Dayton architecture itself also guarantees the legitimacy and equality of the political wills of the three constitutive peoples and the two entities," the statement said.

Earlier in the day, addressing a Srebrenica commemorative event in Potocari, Becirovic spoke about alleged threats to Bosnia and Herzegovina and made a claim that Sarajevo wanted peace but that "the policy of the Belgrade regime" jeopardised that.

"Becirovic's speech is a call to deepen misunderstandings and hatred within Bosnia and Herzegovina and retailor the country's Dayton architecture, and that, unlike the made-up threats he spoke about today, is also the only real threat to stability in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the region," the statement said.

"Countless times in the past, Serbia has insisted that it is ready to have the same quality of relations with the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina as it now has with Republika Srpska. However, Sarajevo has turned a deaf ear on that and demonstrated no readiness to respond to our outreached hand in the spirit of good-neighbourliness," the MFA said in the statement.

"There are no Greater Serbia declarations but only efforts by the people of Republika Srpska not to fall victim to Sarajevo's unreasonable isolationist policy or be held hostage to the unrealistic anti-Dayton ambitions of the Bosniak political elite in Bosnia and Herzegovina," it said.

"The recently adopted Declaration on Protection of the National and Political Rights and the Joint Future of the Serbs, which Becirovic is trying to portray as a Greater Serbia manifesto, is fully in accordance with the Dayton Agreement," it said.

Not a single letter of the Declaration puts into question the territorial integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina and certainly contains nothing that could be seen as a threat to Bosniaks, with whom the Serbs want to have the best possible relations, the MFA also said.