Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-05-17-Speech-4-179"
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"en.20010517.8.4-179"2
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"Mr President, Bosnia-Herzegovina will either be a three-nation state, or it will cease to exist. The country will only survive if – at least in the medium term – all three communities want to live in this state. That sounds simplistic, but it is a fact which we very often ignore. I therefore believe that the time has come not only to take action against the hardliners of all nationalities, but also to ask ourselves self-critically for once what we have done wrong. In my view, Doris Pack pointed the right way forward here. Dayton was a step towards the absence of war. Now it is time to start moving towards genuine peace. Moving towards peace ultimately means creating a tripartite federation in which all three communities enjoy equal rights.
Believe me, I do not want to justify the actions of the Croat extremists in Mostar, but one reason why they are popular, of course, is that they do not see why the Croats, as an ethnic group, do not enjoy the same rights as the
for example. This is an enormous problem which we must address, for in this respect, there is no equality or symmetry within the Federation.
The second point which we must be clear about – as Doris Pack has already mentioned – is refugee return. In this area too, there must be no double standards, and the same applies to the issue of cooperation with the Tribunal in The Hague. There is a considerable lack of symmetry as regards the extradition of indicted persons to The Hague. In the long term, the people in this region will only be prepared to cooperate with the Tribunal if they are confident that the perpetrators from all three communities will be extradited and convicted on an even-handed basis. This means that we cannot always point the finger at others; we must be self-critical for once and admit that for a whole range of reasons, we very often apply double standards.
I should like to thank Mr Swoboda for openly addressing an issue which we must all be clear about: that unfortunately, President Kostunica also appears to be encouraging certain forces in the
to pursue nationalist policies. I believe that we must make it quite clear to Belgrade that there are conditions attached to the assistance we provide, and that this type of support for the nationalists in the
is unacceptable. There must be conditionality across the board: not only in our assistance to Bosnia-Herzegovina but also to Serbia or Yugoslavia. We made this quite clear in the case of Croatia. As for Yugoslavia, our euphoria about the ousting of Milosevic – which we naturally welcome – threatens to make us lose our perspective to some extent. Unfortunately, that distorts our view of what is important in the region."@en1
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