Ms Tija Memi?evi?:

I would like to address some of my remarks to the issues raised by the Deputies. Bosnia is not a stable country.

We are trying to make it stable without creating basic foundations for the country to be stable in the long term. Many of the EU representatives who come are intentionally obsessed with stability because they identify particular partners and they are willing to extend them political support through visits and public proclamation and to accept all kinds of inappropriate political compromises which fall short of European standards and norms. They continue counting on those politicians pretending that they will continue with a stable approach. That is all false because it is not grounded in reality.

I do not have a problem with politicians meeting in a bar but I have a problem, as a taxpayer, paying for a parliament because these things happen in the bar but in no other place. They never go on the public record. The problem is not that politicians will sit and talk but that they all the time sit and talk and we never know what is going on and then we are presented with a certain political agreement that the EU will readily accept because member states are just happy that something is going on and they can say "Look they are talking" as if that is sufficient. They then proceed to implement the agreement without ever going through the regular procedures. Nobody goes on the record and that is the problem that we, as citizens in the country, have. That is why we cannot keep anybody accountable.

I also have to go back to the issue of elected representatives. I intentionally made that statement because the Bosnian constitutional and electoral systems are designed in such a way that a high percentage of citizens cannot participate in the political system. For me, the legitimacy of the majority of the elected representatives considering how the system is designed is questionable. This issue will become more obvious, the more we have to approach certain European standards. The first glance at the voters database shows there is something wrong. In the presidential election vote in 2010, 20% of ballots were invalid but nobody investigated this. In the local elections, 25% of ballots were invalid and nobody investigated this. There is a serious problem with our electoral system which undermines this automatic assumption that one is talking to elected representatives. I can go a step further and point out that in this particular case, we are talking about politicians whose party just lost the elections. It is a question of who they are. At that moment, he is not a state official; he is just a politician who is having this marginal position of the presidency of an entity but the EU is still talking to him. The message from it is that one must always take care because these politicians decide one's destiny.

It is not that EU representatives should not talk to elected politicians or that Bosnia should not be a stable state but let us talk about how politicians are elected, let us have a normal partnership relationship with them in the same way the EU representatives should have a normal partnership relationship with me as a representative of the civic sector. One does not have to circumvent them to come to me; that is not the problem. The problem is when I stand for the European standard and the EU does not, they have the absolutely ideal political position. That is what I talking about when I am talk directly to citizens and when I tell them how to treat the elected politicians.