At a joint press conference in Ankara, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Croatian counterpart both agreed that the 1995 agreement which ended the 1992-5 war in Bosnia is not working.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on Wednesday for the revision of Bosnia’s 1995 Dayton Agreement in Ankara alongside Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic who was paying an official visit.
“Dayton should be revised. It was understood during the past that Dayton under these circumstances cannot produce any solution for the future of Bosnia,” the Turkish President said, Anadolu Agency reported.
“The UN must come forward [to update Dayton] and a stronger step should be taken,” Erdogan added.
Signed in Dayton Ohio in the US 22 years ago, the US-brokered agreement ended the 1992-5 Bosnian war with a complex state system based on power sharing among the country’s three constituent nations, Bosniaks [Bosnian Muslims], Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats.
Critics say it has left Bosnia in a political logjam and has deepened the country’s ethnic divisions.
Croatia, meanwhile, has long complained that ethnic Croats in Bosnia are marginalised, as each of the country’s two entities is dominated by Serbs or Bosniaks.
Erdogan noted on Wednesday evening that the Dayton deal had been created in a short time and in a hurry.
“The Dayton Agreement has many deficiencies and it could not produce any solution. Rotating members of the Presidential council every eight months and not creating a proper army are serious problems for Bosnia,” he observed.
Croatia’s news agency Hina said President Grabar-Kitarovic confirmed that she agreed with a journalist’s statement on the “crawling [pace of] changes” to the Dayton Agreement.
According to the Croatian Presidential website, two leaders also exchanged views on current events in the region and on the state of affairs in Southeast Europe.
“Erdogan’s visit to Croatia has encouraged the further development of economic relations and those effects are already being felt,” the Croatian President pointed out in the press conference, Croatia’s Jutarnji List reported.
Both leaders emphasized the importance of growing economic relations between two countries.
“I should come with Turkish businesspeople in my first visit to Zagreb and sit and to meet with Croatian counterparts,” Erdogan said, adding: “We aim to increase our [annual] trade volume up to one billion US dollars. Our trade volume has increased in recent years and reached 575 million US dollars in first 11 months of 2018.”
Before the joint press conference, several agreements on religious, cultural and humanitarian issues were signed.
Read more The Balkaninsight
