Turkey welcomes Bosnia government formation deal
Turkey has said it welcomes a deal by the six winning parties following a year of negotiations to agree on a prime minister and his cabinet ministers on Wednesday, urging immediate reforms which it said are long needed. Agreement between the parties elected to share power, however, was not based on overcoming differences, but rather a realization that if the country continued any longer without a government there could be no budget - and without a budget state institutions would simply grind to a halt in 2012. For 14 months, election winners had quarreled over who would run which ministry, but Wednesday's deal clears the way for the formation of a government as soon as January. A statement released by the Turkish Foreign Ministry on Thursday said the deal is based on reconciliation and sacrifice of all sides and that Turkey believes the agreement will clear the way for reforms that it said the country urgently need. The statement added that Turkey attaches great importance to peace, stability and prosperity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, reiterated that it always stresses territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Balkan nation. It underlined that Turkey also strongly supports Bosnia and Herzegovina's Euro-Atlantic integration. Since the peace agreement that ended Bosnia's 1992-95 war, power has been mostly shared by three nationalist parties. The government is divided by ethnicity, with four seats reserved for Muslim Bosniaks, three for Serbs and three for Croats. However, at last October's elections Muslim Bosniaks gave up on their national party in droves, overwhelmingly electing the Social Democratic Party, whose membership is multiethnic. The Bosniaks make up the largest percentage of the population, and many claim they no longer care about party ethnicity - simply wanting to support a movement with a solid political and economic platform.