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ZAGREB, Oct 18 (AFP) - Croatian President Franjo Tudjman said Monday that Bosnia-Hercegovina can only survive if it establishes a separate Bosnian Croat entity, splitting the country into three ethnically defined areas.
Tudjman told a press conference for foreign journalists the survival of the Bosnian Croat community in Bosnia-Hercegovina was vitally important for Croatia, "given the form of the frontiers" between the two states.
"I have personally supported the survival of Bosnia-Hercegovina," he said. "But Bosnia can only remain a country with three individual entities."
Some politicians have already broached the subject, but the international community has rejected the notion of a third entity.
Under the Dayton peace agreement that ended Bosnia's 1992-95 war, Bosnia-Hercegovina was split into the Serb-run Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation.
Tudjman however noted that the Bosnian Croat group now only makes up 10 percent of the population, but had made up 29 percent of the population before World War II.
Bosnian Croats are only a majority in the so-called Croatian Community of Herzog-Bosna, along Bosnia's southern border with Croatia, which maintains close ties with Zagreb.
During the 1993-94 Muslim-Croat conflict, Bosnian Croats declared the "Croatian Republic of Herzog-Bosna" in southern Bosnia with the political and military support of Zagreb, but this was dissolved on US insistence.
Tudjman also maintained Zagreb's stance in the face of a complaint lodged with the UN Security Council by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague for non-cooperation with the UN warcrimes court's requests.
The ICTY is still waiting to get documentation on two military operations, which prosecutors refer to as Operations "Flash" and "Storm", in which Croatian forces launched offensives to reclaim secessionist Serb territory in 1995.
Zagreb maintains that these operations were justified acts of defence, and Tudjman said Monday that he would not extradict Croatian generals who had been involved.
Tudjman said Zagreb would continue to cooperate with the ICTY, and expressed his country's support for the "impartiality of international justice", but would not accept being the only scapegoat.
"Croatia is the only country (in the former Yugoslavia) to cooperate in concrete terms with The Hague," he said.
The Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, who directed the 1991 war against Croatia and have been publicly indicted for warcrimes by the ICTY, are still at large.