BOSNIAN SERBS TO SEEKS SAME RIGHTS AS KOSOVO ALBANIANS IF ENTITIES ENDANGERED
SRNA - September 27, 2004

Banja Luka, 25 Sep: The acting chairman of the Serb Democratic Party (SDS), Dragan Cavic (also Bosnian Serb president), said this evening that the (Bosnian) Serb Republic (RS) did not want to change the Dayton Agreement, but if the political pressure coming from the Federation for a constitutional rearrangement of Bosnia-Hercegovina were to continue, the SDS would ask the international community to grant the Serbs the same rights as it did to the Albanians in Kosovo and the Montenegrins in SCG (Serbia-Montenegro), including the right to self-determination.

"The RS was not created by the will of Alija Izetbegovic and his political followers, but by the will and desires of the Serb people, and it should be stated clearly that there can be no Bosnia-Hercegovina without the RS," Cavic told the SDS gathering in the Borik sports hall in Banja Luka.

According to him, the SDS "is the ideological and political creator of the RS and it toppled communism at the beginning of 1990s".

Cavic stressed that the SDS wanted to have "a partnership relation with the international community and dialogue with political opponents, and it will not agree to the Serbs being outvoted". He told Bosniak politicians Sulejman Tihic, Haris Silajdzic and Zlatko Lagumdzija that "persistent insistence on changes to the Bosnia-Hercegovina Constitution so that there are no entities, represents a call to go back to the early 1990s".

He said that the RS agreed to conduct a policy of drawing closer to Brussels in this new political climate, but that in this process the RS had to have its own place, status and national identity within Bosnia-Hercegovina.

"A difficult road is still ahead of us because political pressure to change the constitutional order in Bosnia-Hercegovina will continue, and we must address some difficult pages from our past and advocate cooperation with the Hague tribunal," Cavic stressed. (Passage omitted: local officials address gathering)
 

Source: SRNA news agency, Bijeljina, in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian 1915 gmt 25 Sep 04

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