After meetings yesterday between the leaderships of the SNSD and HDZ BiH, RS and SNSD president Milorad Dodik said that the two parties were in agreement on key points relating to implementation of the Sejdic-Finci decision. President Dodik reiterated that the RS would not accept indirect election for its member of the BiH presidency, and, addressing the HDZ’s main concern, stated that it was unacceptable to allow one people to choose the representative of another.
One major stumbling block in implementing the ruling has been the concern of Croats in BiH that their representation could not be assured without specific ethnic criteria for the presidency.
Mr. Dodik spoke at length about the comparative simplicity of implementing the ruling within RS, as compared to the Federation.
“We in RS have a consensus around the implementation of the ruling, and we are prepared to amend the RS Constitution in a manner that would enable candidacy of anyone for the member of the Presidency. In RS the direct election of members of the Presidency remains in force, and that election assumes that the word ‘Serb’ in the constitution would change to the word ‘a [citizen]’. Nothing more than that, because the ruling seeks just the abolition of discrimination. At the RS level it is not acceptable to have the indirect principle of election for members of the Presidency. In FBiH, because of the complexity of the mechanism of election, we are prepared to accept a model around which our federal partners agree. This cannot be exclusive of anyone,” the SNSD president said.
