” “Ten years after the Dayton peace agreements for ex Yugoslavia, the bishops of Bosnia Herzegovina (BeE) will be in Rome on the occasion of the visit ad limina with Benedict XVI which is due to start on February 23rd. The previous day, in Rome, at the foreign pressroom (4.00 pm), on the initiative of the Italian Catholic Action movement and the International Law Institute for Peace “Giuseppe Toniolo”, the bishops will meet the press to talk of the situation of these agreements and to report about the state of the region. In a document that will be given to the Pope, the Bishops Conference of BeE denounces “the current political situation, and even more the one that is offered by the constitutional changes implies a direct support of the splitting of the BeE into a Serbian and a Bosnian identity, thus creating a State which would drive out all Croatians who, even just after the Dayton agreement and its enforcement in the BeE, are already vitally and also biologically threatened. If we should follow the rationale of the unfair Dayton agreement, we would destroy once and for all the multiethnic character of the State of BeE, thus giving more grounds to the nationalistic tensions in the Balkans”. The grounds for such denunciation lie in “injustice towards the Croatian population to which the fate of the Catholic Church in BeE is inseparably linked”. To make the country functional and fit for the EU countries, the bishops propose a “unitary, undivided and decentralised state without the current splitting into different identities”.
