Ivanić: SDA is producing crises, conflict may arise

Chairman of the BiH Presidency Mladen Ivanić held a press conference today where he spoke about initiating the process of revising the verdict in the BiH lawsuit against Serbia for genocide, N1 reports, Patria conveys. 

"The first attack on Serbs was when Tomislav Nikolić's visit was cancelled due to Naser Orić's arrest. After that, the attack on Aleksandar Vučić in Srebrenica happened, it continued on the Day of the RS, and how a major political crisis was created from it. It continued and carried on with January 9th, then the arrest and questioning of key people from the Serb people. It culminated with the revision," said Mladen Ivanić.

Ivanić said that SDA intends to produce crises.

"It is clear that SDA's policy is to produce crises. No one else has caused such a sequence of events. This deserves a political response. Colleagues from the Serb people who asked me for a session did not convince me to convene that session. A Presidency session would have the purpose of legalizing the behavior of these people, because believing that they would give up on the revision is naive, superficial, and wrong."

The decision on holding sessions of the BiH Presidency will be made next week.

"Next week I will make a decision on whether there will be a session or not. We can only state that this was done outside the institutions of BiH. SDA has created parallel structures, in the coming days you will be able to see how parallelism functions, and that is the biggest blow to Dayton BiH."

He stated that if BiH is identified with only one nation, then it is a return to pre-war issues.

"Identifying BiH with only one nation is a return to pre-war issues, and I think this is a serious political situation. The consequence is also the abandonment of consensus in making political decisions. We did not violate the decision on that in the past, neither I nor Mr. Čović."

Ivanić claims that such a situation can lead to a worsening of relations.

"In such situations, relations can escalate, even conflict, but we don't need that. My proposal is for the caucuses in the RS Assembly to request an extraordinary session on this topic. Not on the revision, because it has no theoretical chance of passing."

He also said that he intends to write to the PIC.

"I intend to write a letter to the PIC member states that are guarantors of the Dayton Agreement and tell them that these are the biggest challenges that Dayton has faced: parallelism and the destruction of BiH institutions. All these months I have been preparing the ground, knowing that this would happen, which is why I am more concerned with the implications of the revision than with the revision itself."