Foreigners destructed the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) but, despite that, it is necessary to fight for and build up a higher autonomous status of the Republika Srpska (RS), said President of the RS, Bosnia's Serb-dominated entity, Milorad Dodik.

Speaking for Serbian daily ‘Srpski telegraf’, Dodik said that any talk about a new Dayton agreement would lead to “dissolution of Bosnia and Herzegovina”.

The DPA was a result of the international peace talks that ended the conflict in Bosnia in the early 1990s and divided the country into two semi-autonomous entities – the Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The document was signed in 1995 by the international envoys, who led the peace negotiations, and the sides involved in the conflict.

Recent ideas of initiating a new international conference on Bosnia, unofficially called the Dayton 2, which would bring changes to the state constitution and improve functionality of the state, were not accepted well particularly among the Bosnian Serbs as they believe the implementation of the original Dayton agreement is enough to ensure equality of peoples and fair functioning of the country.

Dodik also said there was a huge responsibility on the President of Serbia Aleksandar Vucic, who, according to him, “has understanding for the RS.”

“There is a huge responsibility and huge pressure on him. It is on me, however, to defend the idea and survival of the Republika Srpska under impossible conditions,” he underlined.

Speaking about wartime leaders of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia, also the leaders of nationalist parties who played a dominant role in the dissolution of former Yugoslavia, Dodik said the Bosniak leader Alija Izetbegovic, late Bosnian President, was “an avid Islamist.”

“His key sentence about sacrificing the peace for Bosnia had brought the peoples in a war where 94,000 of all peoples and ethnicities were killed,” concluded Dodik.

During the interview the RS president also mentioned he was warned back in 1999 there was a plan of the “Zemun clan”, a Belgrade-based clan of Serbian mafia, to remove him.

“The international community informed me in 1999 that there were two sniper shooters in Banja Luka tasked to kill me. We increased the security measures and that was all,” he said, adding that threats are present even now.