MOSCOW, December 14. /TASS/. The gambles of Western countries in relation to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) have the most negative impact on the situation in the Balkans, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a column he contributed to Serbian newspaper Politika on the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement.
He said that Western countries under the pretext of ensuring the functionality of the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina, are imposing "a so-called civic concept designed to blur the identity of the state-forming peoples."
"The real goal is to create conditions under which the political elites of only one of the three peoples of BiH could freely implement an agenda dictated from the outside to the detriment of the interests of other Bosnian parties," Lavrov said. "Such gamble has the most negative impact on the situation in the region."
He said that at one time "it was the unilateral declaration of independence from Yugoslavia by the authorities of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, bypassing the opinion of the Bosnian Serbs, that marked the beginning of the civil war."
Lavrov also drew attention to the fact that although the leading Western countries assumed the role of partners in ensuring the implementation of the Dayton Agreement and promoting a post-conflict settlement, they, "driven by selfish interests, almost immediately set course for scrapping the Dayton construction."
