FM Kovač: I will inform EU colleagues of visit to Stolac

(Hina) - Croatian Foreign and European Affairs Minister Miro Kovač said in Luxembourg on Monday that he would brief his EU counterparts of his recent visit to the southern Bosnia and Herzegovina town of Stolac where local elections were interrupted over violent incidents

(Hina) - Croatian Foreign and European Affairs Minister Miro Kovač said in Luxembourg on Monday that he would brief his EU counterparts of his recent visit to the southern Bosnia and Herzegovina town of Stolac where local elections were interrupted over violent incidents.

"This afternoon I will take the podium and I will underline that I visited Stolac together with Deputy Prime Minister Bozo Petrov, who in the meantime was appointed parliament speaker, and that we talked to Stolac municipal head and gave our support to Bosnia and Herzegovina institutions to investigate the incidents and the attempts to undermine constitutional and legal order in the country and we asked that an investigation be conducted before repeating the elections in Stolac," Kovač said in a break of a meeting of EU ministers who convened in Luxembourg.

Before the break, the ministers adopted conclusions in which they regretted the unlawful referendum in the Republika Srpska and called on the authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina to launch an investigation into irregularities and violent incidents at the recent local elections.

The conclusions do not specify any incident individually.

Most attention was drawn to an incident in Stolac which led to 27 people being arrested by cantonal police after Democratic Action Party (SDA) member Salmir Kaplan physically attacked members of the local electoral committee. Several activists then removed official election documents and the voting in that constituency was interrupted.

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