Bosnian Politicians Snub Trust-Building Get-Together

The chairman of the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dragan Covic, announced on Wednesday that a planned working lunch in the town of Mostar with presidency members and the country's political party leaders has been cancelled.

The official reason given by Covic's office was the "inability of the participants to arrive".

However all those invited, except Milorad Dodik, the president of Bosnia's Serb-dominated entity Republika Srpska and leader of the Alliance of the Independent Social Democrats, SNSD party, had refused to attend.

The Bosniak member of the Bosnian presidency, Bakir Izetbegovic, said on Tuesday that he would not attend the meeting because he thinks "that it is necessary and only appropriate to organise a meeting in the institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina with the presidents of all political parties forming a coalition at the state level or in a wider format with the presidents of all parliamentary political parties that in 2015 signed a declaration of Bosnia and Herzegovina's readiness to implement the Reform Agenda", according to a statement from his Party of Democratic Action, SDA.

Fahrudin Radoncic, leader of the Union for a Better Future of Bosnia and Herzegovina, SBB party, cancelled because of Izetbegovic's absence.

Radoncic told Covic in a telephone conversation that "without Izetbegovic, the meeting loses the political capacity and the sense of the whole intention to talk to the widest possible extent", Bosnian media reported.

Representatives of political parties in Republika Srpska who are part of the ruling coalition in Bosnia and Herzegovina but in opposition to the entity's government led by Dodik, refused to attend the meeting because Dodik was invited.

"A meeting in a format in which...