Bosnians Argue Over Claim to Slice of Montenegro

Experts, professors, intellectuals and politicians met in the Bosnian parliament on Tuesday to debate what the country should do over the issue of Sutorina - a coastal area in southern Montenegro that some Bosnians say should belong to Bosnia.
 
The debate was organized by parliament's Constitutional-Legal Commission after a House of Representatives MP, Denis Becirovic, proposed a resolution that would reject the current border agreement with Montenegro and demand the return of the territory.

Bosnian experts say the area around Sutorina belonged to Bosnia until 1945 and was "illegally" grabbed by Montenegro later on during the Yugoslav era.
 
The debate reflected strongly conflicting opinions among different officials and academics on this issue.
 
According to one school of thinking, Bosnia cannot now start disputing the country's borders after the Badinter Arbitration Committee, addressing legal questions in former Yugoslavia, ruled in 1991 that the internal republican borders of the Yugoslav federation should not be changed. The borders were also confirmed by the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the 1992-5 war in Bosnia, as well as the country's new constitution.
 
Zeljko Obradovic, from the Civil Affairs Ministry's Border Commission, said that there were no grounds for Bosnia to claim the territory of Sutorina and that such ideas were dangerous.
 
"I think we don't need this," he said. "The agreement we made with Montenegro is fair, we worked on it for 13 years. Historical right is irrelevant here. Yes, Sutorina was once a part of Bosnia and Herzegovina until 1945 but all documents after that treated it without Sutorina."
 
Obradovic said he feared that opening up the Sutorina dispute could...