Speech delivered by H.E. Bojan Šošić, Ambassador of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Kingdom of Sweden, at the celebration on the occasion of the Independence Day of Bosnia and Herzegovina, organised by the Embassy of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Stockholm and the Western Balkans Friendship Group of the Riksdag.

Swedish Riksdag, 28 February 2025

Your Excellencies, esteemed Members of the Riksdag, dear friends and colleagues, dear compatriots, thank you for joining us for this celebration of the Independence Day of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I extend my heartfelt thanks to the Western Balkans Friendship Group of the Riksdag for hosting this event, in particular Mr Denis Begić. I am most pleased also that H.E. Carl Michael Gräns, Director, Deputy Head of Department for Europe and North America in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Sweden, is also here with us to address the gathering.

This is by no means the first speech that I give on the occasion of the Independence Day of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but I felt it was at this moment in time quite appropriate for me to resort to a particular association of the concept of independence to a notion belonging to my primary profession, psychology. Allow me, therefore, to suggest that independence can be understood and operationalised also in the sense of what we sometimes call agency, the state in which we as rational beings strive towards achieving certain aims, and act in retaining and gaining power over various conditions and processes. It is that sense of agency that enabled Bosnians to act and live through a war that broke out soon after the referendum for independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina, held on 29 February and 1 March 1992, months after Robert Badinter's Arbitration Commission concluded in November 1991 that the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia is in the process of dissolution.

Bosnians were forced to resist opposing undemocratic policies, which would ultimately end up being qualified by international courts as joint criminal enterprises against Bosnia and Herzegovina and not a civil war; leaving tens of thousands as victims of ethnic cleansing, war crimes and genocide, or forcing so many of them to flee, as many did right here, to Sweden. For those who stayed, that resistance was so often adequately described as nothing short of miraculous, given that the context of those efforts meant also an embargo to import weapons for defence. In times of global unease, it is now again needed to manifest a sense of agency, this time in insisting on upholding and advancing the rule of law and values of liberal democracy. We are keenly aware that the conditions of the alignment of Bosnia and Herzegovina with these values, as expressed in the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, are paradoxically less present now than in the time when Badinter and his colleagues from constitutional courts across Europe, working on behalf of the then European Community, having found that Yugoslavia was imminently dissolving, appraised the pre-war legal system in Bosnia, and recommended the implementation of a referendum, which ultimately led to Bosnia and Herzegovina declaring its independence.

This situation is evident if for no other reason, then through a series of still not implemented judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, starting with the judgment in the Sejdić-Finci case in 2009, putting in focus the fact that in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, minorities like Jews and Roma people are not eligible to stand for office, such as in the Presidency or the House of Peoples of the Parliamentary Assembly.

It is for such reasons that working and advocating for improving primarily the standards, perhaps even more so than the status of Bosnia and Herzegovina when it comes to aligning with the values of the European Convention, is an imperative for all citizens that love Bosnia and believe in democracy. And that demands not only having a strong sense of agency but also having true and tested friends. I am particularly honoured to be serving my country, not only a state, but a society as well, as its Ambassador here in Sweden, and to Estonia and Finland, all of them countries that we know stand firmly in support of exactly those values, which make this continent a space where life is truly worth living, as life is not only about sustenance and survival, but also about beauty, joy, belonging, and perhaps even some wisdom. In that spirit, happy Independence Day, Bosnia!

Sretan Dan nezavisnosti, Bosno!