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Dodik 'challenges' Americans, vows to tear country apart despite warnings

2023-12-30 16:52:11Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Dodik 'challenges' Americans, vows to tear country apart despite
Dodik me Vladimir Putin

The Bosnian Serb separatist leader vowed to continue weakening his country that still suffers the wounds of war to the point when it will be torn apart, despite a U.S. pledge to prevent it.

"I am not irrational, I know america's response will be to use force. But I have no reason to be afraid of this to sacrifice (Serbian) national interests," Milorad Dodik, the president of Republika Srpska, told the Associated Press news agency on Friday.

He said any attempt to use international intervention to further strengthen Bosnia's shared multi-ethnic institutions would be met with the Bosnian Serbs' decision to abandon them completely and return the country to a state of division and dysfunction, as it was at the end of the brutal inter-ethnic war period of the 1990s.

Because Western democracies will disagree with this, he added, "in the next period, we will be forced by their response to declare full independence" of Bosnia's Serb-controlled regions.

The war in Bosnia began in 1992 when Belgrade-backed Bosnian Serbs tried to create an "ethnically pure" region with the intention of joining neighboring Serbia, killing and expelling the country's Croats and Bosniaks, who are predominantly Muslim. More than 100,000 people were killed and more than 2 million, or over half of the country's population, were driven from their homes before a peace deal was reached in Dayton, Ohio in late 1995.

The agreement divided Bosnia into two entities, the Serb-run Republika Srpska and the Bosniak-Croat Federation, which was granted broad autonomy but remained bound by several joint multi-ethnic institutions. The agreement also established the Office of the High Representative, an international body tasked with protecting the implementation of the peace accord, which was given broad responsibilities to impose laws or dismiss officials who undermine the fragile postwar ethnic balance, including judges, civil servants and members of parliament.

Over the years, the Office of the High Representative has exerted pressure on Bosnia's ethnic leaders to build joint nationwide institutions, including the military, intelligence and security agencies, the high judiciary and tax administration. However, further strengthening of existing institutions and creating new ones is necessary if Bosnia is to meet its stated goal of joining the European Union.

Milorad Dodik appeared unconvinced Friday by the statement posted on the X-network, formerly known as Twitter, by James O'Brien, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, that Washington would act if anyone tried to change the "basic element" of the 1995 peace agreement for Bosnia and that no one had "the right to secede."

"Among Serbs, one thing is clear and this is a growing awareness that the years and decades ahead of us are the years and decades of Serbian national unity," he said.

"Brussels is using the promise of EU membership as a means to unitify Bosnia," the pro-Russian politician said, adding that "in principle, our policy is still that we want to join but we don't see it as our only alternative."

The EU, he said, "proved that it is capable of working against its own interests" by standing up to Washington against Moscow when Russia began its aggression in Ukraine.

Serbian leader Dodik, who has called for the separation of the Serb entity from the rest of Bosnia for more than a decade, has faced British and U.S. sanctions for his policies but enjoys Russian support.

There is widespread fear that Russia is trying to destabilize Bosnia and the rest of the region to shift at least some of the world's attention away from its war in Ukraine.

"Whether the United States and Britain want to, we will turn the administrative border (between Bosnia's two entities) into our national border," Dodik said. /VOA


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