Dear
@zovkoeu, your invocation of a mandate “to protect Croatian voters wherever they live” dangerously blurs the boundary between legitimate cultural advocacy and extraterritorial political interference. Bosnia and Herzegovina is a sovereign, multiethnic state, not an annex of Croatian national interests. Croats in Bosnia are citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, not a Croatian diaspora to be managed from Zagreb or Brussels. Your role as an elected Croatian official may empower you to speak on matters of regional cooperation or human rights, but it does NOT authorize political stewardship over the country’s internal affairs.
You frame your intervention as a defense of “persecuted Christians,” yet Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina are one of three constitutionally recognized constituent peoples, with extensive representation, veto power, and cultural protections enshrined in the Dayton Accords. I lived in BIH and I can tell you that neither Christians, Jews, nor atheist are harmed in BIH! In fact, I found BIH to be the most welcoming country when it comes to Christians and Jews. Yet, as a Jew, I feared for my life in Croatia. I lived in Zagreb, Vinkovci and Vukovar. Between radical Serbian orthodoxy and Croatian Catholicism I didn’t know which way to turn to keep my head above the water. Persecuted, ha?!!! Christians are not a persecuted class; they are co-authors of the Bosnian state. Bosnia taught them how to share geopolitical right. What you are missing is that your language replicates a colonial posture, one in which the sovereignty of Bosnia is implicitly subordinated to the moral and political will of another nation-state. That is not advocacy—it is disruption masked as solidarity.
If silence is not an option, then speak truthfully: not for the imagined helplessness of Croats in Bosnia, but for the civic maturity needed to build a Bosnia and Herzegovina that is inclusive, sovereign, and resistant to all forms of soft partition—regardless of who advocates them. You will never be able to establish Catholic Christianity as a norm in BIH because BIH is not Croatia. The sooner you realize that you need to work with the currents of BIH, the sooner you’re going to be more successful.