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Tuzla - Local Croats in the northeastern Bosnian city of Tuzla said during a meeting with Croatian Parliament Speaker Josip Leko on Monday that they were committed to contributing to Bosnia and Herzegovina's development and that they wanted to live there on an equal footing with the other two constituent peoples, the Bosniaks and the Serbs.
After the talks in Tuzla, the visiting Croatian official said that "there is no calculation on the part of the Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, they do not have a spare homeland, this is their homeland".
The abbot of a local monastery, Friar Mario Divkovic, thanked the Croatian government for a donation of one million kuna in 2013 for the construction of the local Croatian cultural centre.
He also presented figures about the scaling down of the Croat community in the wider Tuzla region from 35,000 in 1991 to some 20,000-22,000, according to the latest estimates. The dignitary said that the number of inhabitants in local Croat villages was going down.