Bosnia’s New State PM Reveals Ministerial Lineup

Zoran Tegeltija, the recently appointed chairman of the Council of Ministers - Bosnia's state-level government - on Tuesday finally completed the composition of his cabinet, 14 months after the last legislative elections in the country.

The list of nine new ministers, after verification by the Central Election Commission and the State Investigation and Protection Agency, SIPA, needs to be confirmed by the state parliament. But this is considered a formality, given that there is now an agreement between the main ruling parties on the candidates.

The last problem was over the new Minister for Human Rights and Refugees, who was to be nominated by the Democratic People's Alliance, DNS, a party that is part of the ruling coalition in Bosnia's Serb-dominated entity, Republika Srpska, together with the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, SNSD.

But the DNS could not agree on a candidate, so Tegeltija accepted the candidature of Mladjen Bozovic, who has no support from the party leadership - which could complicate relations in the ruling coalition in the RS, as the SNSD and DNS have already had several controversies lately.

The distribution of ministries was determined earlier by an agreement of the leaders of the strongest parties and defined by a national "key", or system of rotation, so that each nationality - Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats - had an equal number of ministries.

In addition to Tegeltija as PM, the SNSD will have two other ministers, Vojin Mitrovic, as Minister of Transport and Communications and Stasa Kosarac, as Minister of Foreign Trade and Economic Relations.

The strongest Bosnian Croat party, the Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, proposed three names, two of which were ministers in the previous cabinet - Vjekoslav...