Puhovski: Croatia and Serbia interfere in BiH's internal affairs because they are allowed to by BiH itself

BiH, (Patria) - Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić paid an official visit to Croatia. This is the first meeting between the President of Serbia and the President of Croatia Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović after almost two years. The last one was held in April 2016 in Serbia.

The two countries are burdened by a number of problems, primarily unresolved issues from the war past, the issue of national minorities, as well as the border issue.

“Relations are burdened by history and today we did not touch upon it and we did not discuss it. It prevents us from calling the relations between the two countries friendly,” Grabar-Kitarović told reporters after the meeting with Vučić, adding that she is nevertheless encouraged by the existence of a will on both sides to overcome these problems.

Analysts, on the other hand, also note that despite the accumulated problems in their own countries, Vučić and Grabar-Kitarović are still not giving up on interfering in the internal affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as they showed during the press conference in Zagreb, when the Croatian president spoke about changes to the Election Law of BiH. This could mean a continuation of the dangerous policy against BiH from the nineties, but also a search for an alibi for the internal problems of Serbia and Croatia on the backs of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or on the backs of the peoples living in BiH.

Croatian philosopher and political analyst Žarko Puhovski has a somewhat different opinion. He believes that a bigger problem than Croatia and Serbia interfering in BiH's internal affairs is that “Bosnia and Herzegovina itself is not interfering in its own affairs.”

“The main problem is not the extent to which Croatia and Serbia are meddling in the affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The real problem is that Bosnia and Herzegovina is not meddling in the affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Puhovski says in a comment for the Patria news agency. He points out “that we learned long ago from the great Hobbes /Thomas Hobbes/,” that there is no vacuum in politics, meaning that when one is absent, others come.

“At the very least, there are thoughts of intervention in BiH, but in reality, it is relatively little, given how incapable Bosnia and Herzegovina has shown itself to be in dealing with its own problems,” says Puhovski.

He points out that the situation is now such that Brussels and Washington are pressuring Belgrade and Zagreb to intervene in BiH - because they have 'their people' in BiH - but that progress can only be made if the US directly gets involved in resolving problems in BiH, which, on the other hand, is unlikely to happen. Donald Trump, Puhovski believes, does not have too much interest in it.

“In my opinion, the absolute responsibility for the situation in BiH lies with the incompetent political leadership of Bosnia and Herzegovina, primarily the Bosniak majority, which shows incomprehensible impotence when it comes to its own state problems. They are exclusively concerned with party and ethnic issues,” concludes Puhovski.