The European Union Commissioner for Enlargement, Olli Rehn, said Friday he "regretted" developments in police reform in Bosnia-Herzegovina, after Muslim leaders rejected an EU-backed plan, according to DPA. "By rejecting (EU representative) Miroslav Lajcak's draft police reform proposal even without discussion, party leaders Haris Silajdzic and Sulejman Tihic have undermined ongoing efforts to reach an agreement on police reform," a Brussels press release said. "This has set back Bosnia and Herzegovina's chances of concluding a Stabilisation and Association Agreement. Bosnia and Herzegovina now risks falling farther behind its neighbours and ending up last on the road to Europe," the statement added. The statement came a day after Silajdzic and Tihic, the Bosnian Muslim community's main political leaders, rejected a proposal by Lajcak - the international community's administrator in Bosnia - designed to move the stalled police reform in the country. Currently, each of Bosnia's two constituent entities - the Muslim- Croat Federation and the Serb-run Srpska Republic - has its own police force, which does not go out of its territories. Both Silajdzic and Tihic said Lajcak's police reform proposal - details of which have not been made public - only "legalizes the current situation." Tihic also compared Lajcak's proposal to a "legalization of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina" during the country's 1992-1995 war. And the two men requested that the police reform should continue as suggested earlier by the former international administrator in Bosnia, British politician Paddy Ashdown. That plan foresaw setting the police budget on the state level, establishing police regions in the country and allowing the police of Bosnia's two ethnic entities to step over their "imaginary" borders.
