Croatia Ex-President Warns of Plan to Break Up Bosnia

Former Croatian President Stjepan Mesic claimed on Monday that the leaders of Bosnia and Herzegovina's Serbs and Croats want to break up the country - a goal that could eventually lead to war.

Mesic alleged that Milorad Dodik, the president of Bosnia's Serb-dominated entity Republika Srpska, and the Croat representative in the Bosnian tripartite presidency, Dragan Covic, secretly support each other over their mutual aim of "breaking up Bosnia and Herzegovina".

"It's more the goal of Milorad Dodik. Covic sometimes gives decent political statements, but then he has a meeting with Dodik like this and I go back to the thought that he [Covic] is only interested in power," Mesic told N1 TV.

At a meeting between the Dodik and Covic in Banja Luka on Friday, they announced they were working together to draft a law on the state-level Constitutional Court, which some Bosnian Serbs and Croats have accused of being pro-Bosniak.

Covic repeated that he wanted his centre-right Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ party to fight for "the absolute equality of the Croatian people in relation to other peoples in Bosnia and Herzegovina" - a reference to the desire to create a third, Croat entity in Bosnia.

In his interview for N1, Mesic said that those that who advocate the creation of a Croat entity - an idea supported by some members of the HDZ in Croatia itself - are not taking into account all the Croats who live in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

"Those who offer the third entity don't say what will happen with Posavina [a northern Bosnian region where the Croat population has been dwindling]," he said.

"They are all striving for the Federation [entity which contains most of the country's Croats] to crumble. Establishing a new frontier means war," he...