Cardinal Vinko Puljić, the retired archbishop of Vrhbosna, in a Sunday interview for Bosnian federal television, delivered the most critical words on the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina to come from any Bosnian church leader in years. „You put a straitjacket on us and walked off, and we inside it manage as we know how." - a sentence that in the original is in Bosnian and translates fully into other languages without losing its sting.

Puljić was talking about Dayton. The 1995 agreement that ended the war in Bosnia but, as the cardinal emphasises, did not establish a just peace. „It stopped the war, but it failed to establish a just peace that respects the rights and dignity of all peoples." Thirty years later, Dayton still holds Bosnia in a state - functional only enough to survive, not enough to develop.

„A three-legged stool." That's the image Puljić uses for the three constituent peoples - Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats. If one leg weakens, the whole stool falls. Viewed from the Balkans, the metaphor has a particular weight. The Bosniaks make up the largest share of the population, but have the least economic power. The Croats are practically pushed out of the joint federal framework. The Serbs have full autonomy in Republika Srpska, with an educational and fiscal system that is almost a state within a state.

The cardinal also mentioned something more subtle - that he had seen secret plans from all three sides and was disgusted by them. He doesn't want to talk specifics. „Those are domestic plans, not the international community's," he said. What is hidden behind this statement? In the Bosnian political world, it most likely refers to territorial proposals, agreed-upon partitions with Croatia and Serbia, or plans for de facto establishment of a third entity.

The topic of a third entity - a Croat entity separate from the Federation - has been gaining political weight in recent years. Puljić took a nuanced position: he isn't for ethnic cleansing, but he isn't against restructuring either, if the current arrangement isn't working. That opens the road for politicians like Dragan Čović of the HDZ to keep lobbying for administrative reorganisation.

Puljić also rejected the idea that the conflict in Bosnia is a religious one. „It's a war of interests," he says. Ordinary people - Catholics, Muslims, Orthodox - live together peacefully. The political spectacle is what produces the tension. That will be a familiar diagnosis to anyone living in the Balkans - the problems rarely come from ordinary people, more often from those who get called „politicians".

For Macedonia, Puljić's statement carries far-reaching parallels. When Brussels „put on the straitjacket" with the Prespa Agreement and walked off, who did it leave inside it? Not the institutions - the people. And those „inside" have been trying for seven years to find a way to breathe. Bosnia's situation is more extreme - 30 years in the same jacket, and the cardinal is saying out loud, for the first time, that the jacket is an expression of designed chaos, not of „a lack of political maturity".

The question that remains: how far can the Balkans move forward with agreements signed outside it? Dayton, Prespa, Brussels - all are „international solutions" for domestic problems. All have the same defect: they lack willpower and legitimacy in the country where they're applied. Cardinal Puljić, at 80, can afford to say it out loud. Few others can.