Itar-Tass
February 12, 2014
Foreign factor behind events in Bosnia and Ukraine – expert
Tamara Zamyatina
MOSCOW: Dismissal of the prime minister and all federal authorities as well as early elections are ultimatums put forward by participants in massive protests staged in a country situated in Central Europe. This is not Ukraine, but a small country of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, events in these two countries are almost identical.
As in Ukraine, protesters in Bosnia accuse authorities of corruption, illegal privatization of enterprises and impoverishment of local residents. According to different estimates, the unemployment rate in the country with a population of four million people makes from 27% to 44%.
The rresidential building, the supreme executive authority in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the city of Sarajevo was damaged in the fire, 348 people were wounded in clashes continuing in many cities between demonstrators and police. Several officials were fired in several cities across the country.
Protests have engulfed only Muslim-Croatian part of the country that is one of two political entities of the federation. But authorities of neighboring Serbia are afraid that riots may spread on Republika Srpska within Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Such common foreign factor as interests of the European Union is behind dramatic events in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Ukraine, head of the Center for Studies of Modern Balkan Crisis of the Russian Academy of Sciences Yelena Guskova, who worked as an expert in the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1994, believes.
“By their pledges to Kiev to make the country an EU member, the West actually pursues a goal of alienating Ukraine from cooperation with Russia. The EU has similar plans for Republika Srpska,” Guskova told Itar-Tass.
“Destabilization of situation in the region has a strategic goal to make Bosnia an integral country without Republika Srpska. Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik is the main mouthpiece of Serbian idea in the Balkans that is an idea of unifying Serbian space in cultural and national terms that the West opposes,” Doctor of Historical Sciences Guskova noted.
“In October 2014 elections of central authorities are to be held in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the EU seeks to oust Dodik from power in all possible ways. As in the case with Ukraine, the West cannot mainly accept Republika Srpska’s orientation towards Russia,” the expert believes.
“Current massive protests in Bosnia certainly have social underpinning caused by economic reasons. But politicians take up a banner of social protest always in their interests of the struggle for power,” Guskova recalled.
“The West has already responded to events in Bosnia with their intention to put the situation under their control to attain their goal. EU High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina from Austria Valentin Inzko proposed to bring peacekeeping troops in the region,” Guskova added.
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