BRUSSELS – High Representative of the EU Kaja Kallas addressed the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina yesterday following the announced resignation of High Representative Christian Schmidt. According to Kallas, EU ministers agreed that it is in the Union’s interest to keep Bosnia and Herzegovina firmly on its European path and avoid further destabilisation.
“We discussed the announced resignation of Christian Schmidt. We agree it is in the EU’s interest not to let the country slip away from the EU path”, Kallas said on Monday after the meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council.
She confirmed that discussions are ongoing regarding Schmidt’s successor and reiterated EU support for the appointment procedure within the Peace Implementation Council (PIC), which is expected to take place in June.
The leaders of the Republika Srpska entity reacted harshly to Kallas’s remarks. In a post on X, a member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the ruling SNSD party Željka Cvijanović, wrote that “if the EU had stuck to its acquis and its proclaimed principles, it would never have supported a situation where laws in some foreign country are enacted by a foreigner for whom no voter in that country has ever cast a ballot”.
“Moreover, the Dayton Agreement never provided for the possibility of some foreigner doing so, just as it did not provide for the existence of the Peace Implementation Council either, and especially not for the application of such repugnant so-called ‘Bonn powers'”, Cvijanović wrote.
She added that “from Europeans, we want to hear that the decision-making process must be returned to domestic institutions, and not that they advocate for the continuation of colonial administration”.
“The departure of Christian Schmidt is important, but I am very skeptical that Europeans would know how to turn that to their advantage. In any case, it is good that some have forced him to leave, but insufficient for healing the sick environment that he and those like him have created in BiH”, Cvijanović concluded.
Milorad Dodik, president of the SNSD party and, until last year, President of Republika Srpska, also reacted on X, writing that “with her ignorance” Kallas “has made every decent person sick of the EU”.
“Had she read anything at all, for instance, Annex X, she wouldn’t come off as foolish”, Dodik wrote.
He added that “Republika Srpska will grow even without the Growth Plan, while the EU will shrink to insignificance as long as Kallas and the other Kajas are around”.
