Bosnian Prime Minister Nikola Spiric has written to the UN accusing the international community's envoy of destabilising his country, the local press reported on 23 May.
Spiric urged United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to remove the international community's high representative in Bosnia, Valentin Inzko, who has the power to pass laws and sack officials in the country's two semi-autonomous entities, AFP reported.
"Continuing foreign intervention in local political issues is destabilising and undermines the creation of a consensus [...] as well as reform efforts," the Bosnian Serb leader is quoted as saying.
The Office of the High Representative (OHR) "should be closed in order to enable Bosnian political leaders to achieve legitimate progress," he said, saying that Inzko, an Austian diplomat, was "contributing to non-functional governance in Bosnia".
In return, Inzko blamed leaders of Bosnia and Herzegovina for what he called a "deterioration" of political dialogue.
"While regional prospects for reconciliation have improved, the language and logic of politics inside Bosnia and Herzegovina appears to have rather deteriorated," Inzko told the United Nations Security Council on 24 May.
The international community representative was presenting to the Security Council the thirty-seventh report on Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) following the Dayton Agreement, covering the period 1 November 2009 to 30 April 2010.
In domestic affairs, "Bosnia and Herzegovina remains afflicted by a lack of a basic – and fundamental - consensus about what sort of country it should be, or could be," Inzko said.
BiH did not know whether it wished to be a more centralised state or a decentralised one, and did not know how to achieve either option, he claimed. As a consequence, the country regrettably cannot take advantage of economic assistance, he added.
Inzko said the leaders of Republika Srpska continued to undermine state institutions and repudiate the authority of the High Representative and the Dayton Peace Agreement, while at the same time, the government of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina had "limped from crisis to crisis during the reporting period".
Bosnian Serbs in the spotlight
Taking the floor next, Haris Silajdžić, chairman of the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, attributed the current stagnation to the so-called "entity voting mechanism," which allows 10 Serb deputies from the Republika Srpska to block any proposed decision by the federation's parliament, comprising 42 deputies.
Silajdžić, who is a Bosnian Muslim, told the session that the entities "have no ownership rights whatsoever" over the country's assets, the Serbian press reported.
He said that Bosnia and Herzegovina is the only legitimate successor to the former Yugoslav Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and therefore owns all the assets of the former Yugoslavia contained within its territory.
Bosnia's right to its own property, he continued, was being questioned by his political opposition but also by the international community's high representative.
A representative of the Russian Federation, Konstantin Dolgov, described the assessments of Inzko and Silajdžićas as unbalanced, saying that they suffered from anti-Serb sentiment and covered up BiH's destructive role in blocking consideration of Republika Srpska's compromise constitutional amendments.
Taking the floor again to respond to the remarks, Silajdžić pointed out that despite having signed the Dayton Agreement, the Russian Federation continued to uncritically support just one ethnic group in Bosnia and Herzegovina, namely, the Bosnian Serbs of Republika Srpska.
