Bosnian Interior Minister Fahrudin Radoncic has resigned because he is unhappy with the country’s migration policy and because there is opposition to investigating the purchase of faulty respirators for the COVID-19 outbreak.
Radoncic told Klix.ba on Tuesday that top officials, including chief diplomat Bisera Turkovic, “do not understand and identify the security threat’’ that the migrants, massing in Bosnia for an attempt to cross into EU-country Croatia, pose.
According to the UN refugee agency, the UNHCR, there are at least 7,200 migrants stranded in Bosnia, the vast majority of them along the border with Croatia in the north-west.
“The crowd remains persistently large, with the central government doing virtually nothing to resolve the problem, leaving everything, from overcrowded shelters to security to be arranged by municipal authorities,” he said.
Radoncic has been vocal with warnings that extremists may be hiding within the crowd.
He also told Klix that elements of the government also blocked his drive to fully investigate a 10.5 million Bosnian mark (6-million-dollar) acquisition of respirators, which turned out to be unusable.
The respirators were bought by the Bosniak-Muslim Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Radoncic accuses the Bosniak side of blocking the investigation to protect themselves.
Radoncic also said that the feuding between Bosniak, Serb and Croat parties forced to work together under the complex administrative system set up in 1995 to end a war will continue blocking Bosnian institutions “for a long time.’’
The country was effectively split along Muslim Bosniak, Orthodox Serb and Catholic Croat ethnic lines to end bloodshed, with the hope that a system of checks and balances would build trust and develop shared Bosnian institutions.
However, ethnic leaders continued to push nationalist agendas and have, since the start, been blocking virtually any proposal made by their rivals, which leaves the central government with few options.
