Davor Gjenero: Trilateral meeting Sarajevo - Belgrade - Zagreb best suits Čović and Dodik

Member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dragan Čović, told reporters in Mostar today after the HNS session that he expects a lot from the visit of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and hopes that a trilateral meeting between BiH, Serbia, and Croatia will happen soon.

- Unfortunately, we have not managed to realize the president's visit to Serbia for a long time. I expect a lot of messages, there are many open issues. The media will impose the topic of the Declaration - said Čović, adding that he thinks Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović will also visit BiH in the next month or two.

Political analyst from Croatia, Davor Gjenero, told the Patria agency that he was not surprised by Čović's message, because, he says, trilateral meetings would precisely position him better in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and would also reduce the blockade in which Čović's friend Milorad Dodik finds himself.

- Former Croatian President Mesić persistently told Croats from BiH that Sarajevo, not Zagreb, is their capital. Neither Mrs. Grabar-Kitarović nor Mr. Plenković say that. But, what they are conveying does not differ significantly from that. Their main intention is for Croats to agree on their status with Bosniaks within the Federation. Zagreb's idea is not to meddle with a third entity, but to ensure the constitutionality of Croats throughout BiH through electoral legislation - Gjenero believes. He adds that Čović certainly did not announce the trilateral meeting out of the blue. He did not announce it without first talking to Dodik. Because, he says, it should be known that Mr. Čović's relations with Mr. Dodik are better than Čović's relations with official Zagreb.

Gjenero reminds that there have been talks about trilateral meetings on the Zagreb - Belgrade - Sarajevo route before, but that Croatia has shied away from it until now.

- The trilateral Zagreb - Belgrade - Sarajevo was proposed by the then President of Serbia, Boris Tadić, as far as I remember, but certainly the Serbian President Vučić, as the then Deputy Prime Minister, proposed it during a visit to Zagreb. Croatian Minister of Foreign Affairs Vesna Pusić at the time considered that Belgrade was not yet ready for Zagreb and Belgrade to enter into serious political cooperation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. That was also the dominant political stance of Zoran Milanović's government - says Gjenero.

When asked why Zagreb feared the Zagreb - Belgrade - Sarajevo trilateral, Gjenero says that the then minister Pusić believed that this would actually open the door for Serbia to relativize the unity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that it would create too much room for Belgrade to atone for Belgrade's years-long wrong policy towards Bosnia and Herzegovina.