Separatist Bosnian Serb chief Milorad Dodik vows to tear his nation aside regardless of U.S. warnings
BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — The Bosnian Serbs’ separatist chief vowed to hold on weakening his war-scarred nation to the purpose the place it can tear aside, regardless of a pledge by the United States to forestall such an consequence.
“I am not irrational, I know that America’s response will be to use force … but I have no reason to be frightened by that into sacrificing (Serb) national interests,” Milorad Dodik, the president of Bosnia’s Serb-run half, informed The Associated Press in an interview Friday.
He mentioned any any try to make use of worldwide intervention to additional strengthen Bosnia’s shared, multiethnic establishments shall be met by Bosnian Serb determination to desert them utterly and take the nation again to the state of disunity and dysfunction it was in on the finish of its brutal interethnic warfare within the Nineteen Nineties.
Because Western democracies won’t be agreeable to that, he added, “in the next stage, we will be forced by their reaction to declare full independence” of the Serb-controlled areas of Bosnia.
The Bosnian War began in 1992 when Belgrade-backed Bosnian Serbs tried to create an “ethnically pure” area with the intention of becoming a member of neighboring Serbia by killing and expelling the nation’s Croats and Bosniaks, who’re principally Muslims. More than 100,000 individuals had been killed and upward of two million, or over half of the nation’s inhabitants, had been pushed from their properties earlier than a peace settlement was reached in Dayton, Ohio, late in 1995.
The settlement divided Bosnia into two entities – the Serb-run Republika Srpska and the Bosniak-Croat Federation – which got vast autonomy however remained linked by some shared, multiethnic establishments. It additionally instituted the Office of the High Representative, a global physique charged with shepherding the implementation of the peace settlement that was given broad powers to impose legal guidelines or dismiss officers who undermined the delicate post-war ethnic stability, together with judges, civil servants, and members of parliament.
Over the years, the OHR has pressured Bosnia‘s bickering ethnic leaders to build shared, statewide institutions, including the army, intelligence and security agencies, the top judiciary and the tax administration. However, further bolstering of the existing institutions and the creation of new ones is required if Bosnia is to reach its declared goal of joining the European Union.
Dodik appeared unperturbed Friday by the statement posted a day earlier on X, formerly known as Twitter, by James O’Brien, the U.S. assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs, that Washington will act if anybody tries to alter “the basic element” of the 1995 peace settlement for Bosnia, and that there’s “no right of secession.”
“Among Serbs, one thing is clear and definite and that is a growing realization that the years and decades ahead of us are the years and decades of Serb national unification,” Dodik mentioned.
“Brussels is using the promise of EU accession as a tool to unitarize Bosnia,” mentioned Dodik, who’s staunchly pro-Russian, including: “In principle, our policy still is that we want to join (the EU), but we no longer see that as our only alternative.”
The EU, he mentioned, “had proven itself capable of working against its own interests” by siding with Washington in opposition to Moscow when Russia launched its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Dodik, who has been calling for the separation of the Serb entity from the remainder of Bosnia for over a decade, has confronted British and U.S. sanctions for his insurance policies however has had Russia’s help.
There are widespread fears that Russia is making an attempt to destabilize Bosnia and the remainder of the area to shift at the very least some world consideration from its warfare in Ukraine.
“Whether U.S. and Britain like it or not, we will turn the administrative boundary between (Bosnia’s two) entities into our national border,” Dodik mentioned.
