The context in which statehood was restored is without any doubt both military and political.

For decades before the restoration of statehood, Bosnia and Herzegovina, its citizens and its peoples, found themselves in a subordinate position in relation to neighboring countries, all due to the character of the constitutional legal order of the states of which it was a part.

The ideas of its partition were not only alive but were also being carried out on the ground and in everyday political reality.

The emergence of the National Liberation Movement in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina was salvational for our country, but also for the generation of people who actively opposed the division and disappearance of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Therefore it is entirely clear why the National Liberation Movement gathered forces and individuals of diverse ideological and political understandings.

They, regardless of their differences, found in the preservation of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a unified state a fundamental consensus and motive for struggle.

Members of the Autonomy Movement embodied in the Yugoslav Muslim Organization, members of the Croatian Peasant Party and members of Serbian civic parties all found themselves in the NLM, but the most organized political force was the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and its provincial committee for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

All of them together, through their struggle within the National Liberation Movement, created the necessary social context for the restoration of statehood.

The historical truth is that not even within the Communist Party did everyone support defining Bosnia and Herzegovina as a unified and indivisible Republic, but thanks to a broad spectrum of political actors, and above all thanks to the patriotism of the generation of Bosnian-Herzegovinian communists at the top of the party and the movement, the position on the necessity of forming Bosnia and Herzegovina as a Republic prevailed.

However, nuances in opinions and approaches were not the decisive reason for such a decision.

That decision was the fruit of the struggle of the people of this country, a struggle whose significance no one could deny, because a people who has taken up arms cannot be denied or ignored.

The nuances, as I said, were not decisive in the decision to form the Republic, but they were decisive in characterizing and defining what that Republic is.

All the sessions of ZAVNOBiH in fact represent a single whole, a unity of the process of restoring statehood.

Still, the first session of ZAVNOBiH in Mrkonjić Grad placed emphasis on the equality of all peoples, while the second session of ZAVNOBiH in Sanski Most, through the Declaration on the Rights of Citizens, placed emphasis on the equality of citizens.

These two sessions of ZAVNOBiH are historical proof that the concepts of the equality of peoples and the equality of citizens do not exclude each other.

ZAVNOBiH is historical proof that they complement one another.

Although it sounds somewhat unusual, the Dayton Peace Agreement and the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina themselves confirmed some of the basic principles recorded during the First and Second sessions of ZAVNOBiH, through the expressed elements of both the ethnic and civic character of our Constitution.

Both the 1943 restoration of statehood and the Independence Referendum and the Dayton Peace Agreement carry within them in continuity the same or similar constitutional principles.

Both the civic and ethnic components have always been present throughout all our constitutional arrangements, but it is also a fact that the competition between these two concepts has almost always been ongoing.

Those who today, by emphasizing only one component, the ethnic one, using only what was emphasized in the First session of ZAVNOBiH while disregarding the Second, seek to smuggle in certain consociational arrangements, are nothing but simple falsifiers of both ZAVNOBiH and Dayton.

For if the existence of broad powers of the houses of peoples is an expression of the ethnic component of the Constitution, then the election of the sovereign, the manner of electing judges of the Constitutional Court and the manner of electing members of the House of Representatives are a concrete expression of the civic component of the Constitution.

There is of course also that somewhat abstract dimension of the civic character of the Constitution, by which the Dayton Constitution defines that the European Convention on Human Rights is superior to the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The values of that Convention fully correspond to the values of the Declaration on the Rights of Citizens from the Second session of ZAVNOBiH.

That is why no three different entities will be created here today or tomorrow, nor will consociational euphemisms help in that.

They will not, because this is contrary to everything Bosnia and Herzegovina is, as recorded in the declarations of ZAVNOBiH and in the provisions of the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Attempts at consociational regression of Bosnia and Herzegovina through further ethnic territorialization or territorialization of the electoral model on an ethnic principle break against the values of ZAVNOBiH and the principles of Dayton.

Therefore Bosnia and Herzegovina is left with two paths, the path of the achieved values and rights for which we fought for decades from ZAVNOBiH to Dayton, and the path of democratic upgrading of these achieved rights, the path of a civic state prescribed by our Constitution and by general democratic values.

Two splendid generations of Bosnian-Herzegovinian people won the state we have.

It is, of course, not perfect, but it is ours, and the sacrifice made for it obliges us to respect it and love it.

I am convinced that the generation that comes after us has the strength to preserve everything that is worthy and to make this country better.

The precondition for that is that we appreciate what we have, that which earlier generations fought for by giving their lives.

In the history of our country there have been many difficult and bleak moments when it seemed that all was lost, but strength was always found to move forward.

Let us remain faithful to this country and believe in it as all Bosnian patriots before us believed.

When almost no one in the world, except a few rare friends, believed in the survival of this state, we believed and we fought.

Let us remain as we were when it was hardest, for then we were invincible.

Allow me, and do not hold it against me, to use this opportunity to congratulate our football players as well, who recently showed in the best way their faith in the homeland and their will to fight for it, to congratulate them on their struggle and, with a message of encouragement, to congratulate them on Statehood Day.

Naturally, I congratulate all of you present here and all citizens on the Statehood Day of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Thank you for your attention.