Salkić: OHR is late, but the fact that they reacted to rewarding war criminals is encouraging

Vice President of the BiH entity RS, Ramiz Salkić, said today that the High Representative's letter to the NSRS is commendable if it represents an announcement of a shift in the international community's policy towards the behavior of Bosnian Serb representatives, although it comes quite late.

Reacting to today's letter from High Representative Valentin Inzko, which he sent to the President of the National Assembly of the RS, Nedeljko Čubrilović, and the caucuses of deputies, giving a three-month deadline to annul all recognitions awarded in the name of the NSRS to persons convicted of war crimes.

- The authorities of the RS entity continuously, through the implementation of systemic discrimination against returnees in all segments of society in this entity, have been grossly violating the Dayton Peace Agreement all these years without sanction.

We daily warn about the Orthodoxization of the educational process and the violation of returnees' right to education tailored to all students, including the right to the Bosnian language, teaching content, school names, and representation of teaching staff in schools in accordance with the RS Constitution. For years, we have been warning about the glorification of war criminals, the denial of judicially proven and adjudicated genocide against Bosniaks, and the implementation of the final phase of genocide.

We warn about systemic discrimination as a peacetime method used by the authorities in this entity, which is carried out exclusively by political representatives of Bosnian Serbs as a means to achieve strategic war goals of an ethnically pure Serbian Orthodox territory. The big question remains why the international community, which in the perception of our public is embodied in the High Representative, has allowed such behavior by Bosnian Serb representatives all these years.

Denial of genocide, denial of final court verdicts, glorification of war criminals, systemic discrimination – all of this has lasted too long and leaves dramatic consequences for returnees in this entity. Many have had to leave their homes again precisely because of these actions by entity and local authorities, as they see no existential and security future for themselves and their families in this entity. If today's letter from the High Representative to the NSRS is an announcement of a shift in the international community's policy towards the behavior of Bosnian Serb representatives towards returnees, then it is commendable, although it comes quite late and after enormous damage inflicted on returnees by the actions of the RS entity authorities.

I call on all returnees in the RS entity, elected and appointed representatives, to continue our joint struggle and persistently warn daily about all the problems we face in this part of our homeland. Although it is unjustly named after only one people, this entity does not belong now, nor will it ever belong, only to the Serbian people as the political representatives of Bosnian Serbs, as well as the media and the educational process in this entity, like to present it.

Twenty-five years have passed since the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement, and this is the right time to start the process of correcting injustices and discriminatory provisions in the Dayton Peace Agreement towards the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and above all towards those who, even after the genocide committed against them and their families, decided to return to their homes.

Our goal is a society of equal rights and equal opportunities for all, without discrimination on religious, national, or any other basis. In achieving this goal, we expect help from representatives of the international community, because we live under a Constitution that was not adopted by the citizens of this country nor by their political representatives in legislative bodies.