Bucalo: Montenegrins sing 'Three hundred million of us and Americans', while BiH remains stagnant

SARAJEVO, (Patria) - Bosnia and Herzegovina has received a formal invitation to submit its first Annual National Programme (ANP), which would activate the Membership Action Plan for NATO. This is a decision by the foreign ministers of the 30 countries of this military alliance, announced by the NATO Headquarters Sarajevo on Wednesday.

Analysts are not very optimistic when it comes to fulfilling the remaining obligations of Bosnia and Herzegovina that the country must meet before joining the NATO alliance, primarily due to the member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the Serb people, Milorad Dodik, who is seeking military neutrality for BiH as long as neighboring Serbia also remains militarily non-aligned.

Dodik stated that he will strictly follow the Resolution of the National Assembly of Republika Srpska on military neutrality and will not support anything related to NATO.

"In this burlesque, NATO was all we needed! Flags are paraded, mortal enemies embrace, grotesque coalitions are formed, and everyone, as one, kisses the happy fate that has brought them the intoxicating taste of power for the next four years. And where is NATO in all this? Nowhere. And that's the end of the story about joining the Alliance," believes journalist Elvir Bucalo.

He reminds that Bosnia and Herzegovina, together with Montenegro, once stood in almost the exact same place where it stands now, but that Montenegro has since moved ahead of BiH.

"'Three hundred million of us and Americans,' sing the Montenegrins, while the nations in Bosnia wonder where the flag is this morning," says Bucalo in a comment for Patria, problematizing what the High Representative is doing, while, as he says, a mechanism for blocking all decisions that "smell" of NATO has been quietly secured.

"And it's not just domestic banditry to blame for this - the political assessment of NATO strategists has failed, who have invested a hundredth of the energy (and money) in convincing the domestically nationalistically embittered poor about the advantages of membership that they invest in the neutrally aligned neighbor. Just like the Brussels administration, which, it is clear to everyone, does not view all of us in the Balkans equally. And, what now? Nothing. More precisely, the burlesque continues with new suicidal zeal, with weak voices from the back row saying that the country needs fewer flags and more jobs, kilometers of roads, clean air. If we had enough of that, neither the EU nor NATO would interest or deceive us," concludes Bucalo.