Sarajevo received the President of the Government this morning on the second day of his tour of the Western Balkans. With less formal enthusiasm than that provided yesterday by Serbia, Pedro Sánchez went directly to the headquarters of the national presidency where he met with the three representatives, Šefik Džaferović, Zeljko Komsic and Milorad Dodik, of the collegiate Presidency - which rotates every eight months-.
Together with the current president, Džaferović, Sánchez has made an institutional statement. From there it has moved to the Bosnian capital's City Hall, located in the historic Moorish-style Library of Sarajevo -built in 1896 during the Austro-Hungarian Empire-, and located a few meters from the enclave where the Archduke of Austria was assassinated, Francisco José I, as a trigger for World War I.
This visit to Bosnia arouses "great enthusiasm" in the president, recalling when, from 1997 to 1999, he was working in the Cabinet of the UN High Representative in this Balkan country, the Spaniard Carlos Westendorp. As he expressed last night in Serbia, Sánchez considers it essential that Bosnia acquire the status of EU candidate that it requested in February 2016, and for this reason he vehemently defended in a recent European Council that the EU grant it that status.
Bosnia is the only one of the Balkan countries with the intention of joining the EU that does not yet have the status of a candidate, despite the fact that it submitted its application for accession more than five years ago. And the Spanish Executive has set as one of the objectives of this trip to the Balkans to encourage Bosnia to speed up the pending reforms -especially those that refer to freedoms and the rule of law- in order to acquire said condition.
Bosnia maintains a special relationship with Spain because there was a Spanish military mission for 18 years that came to displace, in successive stages, more than 45,000 troops. After being declared "mission accomplished" in 2010, the Spanish troops were left under 'Operation Eufor-Althea' where Spain now contributes three soldiers, one in Mons (Belgium) and two in Camp Butmir, Sarajevo, where they support local authorities in maintaining a safe and stable environment, according to information from the Ministry of Defense.
In the afternoon, Sánchez will travel to Mostar, where he will preside over an act of homage to the 23 Spanish soldiers who died on mission and, later, tour the old part of the city that will take him to the so-called Old Bridge. A World Heritage Site since 2005 and a symbol of reconciliation of the city that was destroyed in 1993 by Croatian artillery and that Spanish military engineers rebuilt with their own rubble after being recovered from the Neretva River.
