Bosnian Serb leader Dodik invokes merging of Serb entity with Serbia proper

Milorad Dodik, the increasingly rebellious Bosnian Serb leader, floated on Sunday the idea of merging the Serb half of Bosnia with neighbouring Serbia, taking his separatist, West-defying rhetoric to new levels.

After the 1992-95 conflict between Serbs, Bosniaks, and Croats, post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina was divided into two highly autonomous entities, the Republika Srpska (RS) and the Bosniak-Croat Federation, with a weak central government in Sarajevo.

Speaking at a commemoration of a World War II concentration camp site, where thousands of Serbs perished in 1941-45, the secessionist president of RS said: “We want to say clearly that it’s no threat to anyone if RS expresses its will, the popular will, to form its own country, because we cannot live in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which strangles us and threatens our freedoms.”

“All the people here must take ownership of the idea we have, to proclaim RS a country and unite it with Serbia. We are not making a country on someone else’s territory. This is our country, our property, our freedom,” he added.

“We bear no ill will to Bosniaks and Croats, but my message to them is ‘leave us alone, we cannot be together’,” he also said.

Never shy of making his ideas known, Dodik, who is under US sanctions for undermining the stability and democracy in BiH, summed them up in a tweet, explicitly mentioning the wish that “Serbia and Republika Srpska become a joint state one day”.

The president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, who also attended the commemoration, made no reference to Dodik’s speech but said that Serbs should no longer be divided into Croatian or Bosnian Serbs “because we are one and the same people”.

The non-Serb members of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, Denis Bećirović (Bosniak) and Željko Komšić (Croat) reacted immediately, voicing anger at Dodik’s comments and warning that this should not be ignored by the international community. Bećirović urged the Serbian president to “distance himself from a criminal project aimed against the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Bosnia-Herzegovina”.

Komšić added that Dodik had today openly identified the ultimate goal, which is “annexing part of Bosnia-Herzegovina with Serbia. It was a wartime aim they could not achieve, but we see it has not been abandoned”.

(Zoran Radosavljević | EURACTIV.com)