The Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) will be paying USD 10,000 per month for three months to an American lobbying company for “strategic guidance and counsel with regard to government affairs and public relations activity within the US,” the US-based magazine Mother Jones reported.
SNSD led by Milorad Dodik, the President of the Republika Srpska (RS), Bosnia's Serb-dominated entity, has reached a deal with US President Donald Trump's former campaign aides Jason Osborne and Mike Rubino, who have registered with the Justice Department to lobby for the party.
The Mother Jones recalled that Dodik was sanctioned by the US last year for undermining the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the 1992-95 armed conflict in Bosnia, with his calls for secession of his entity.
Osborne confirmed for the Mother Jones that Dodik's party verbally agreed to pay the said amount per month for three months to the Twin Rocks Global, the company Osborne and Rubino established last month. He said his work for the Bosnian Serb party so far entailed setting up of meetings for RS Prime Minister Zeljka Cvijanovic, who is SNSD's senior official and who visited Washington last month.
Osborne arranged for Cvijanovic to meet with Senator Roger Wicker, the Chairman of the US Helsinki Commission, a federal agency promoting human rights and democracy in Europe, and a meeting with Representative Dana Rohrabacher, the Chairperson of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats. According to the Mother Jones magazine, Rohrabacher often supports ethnic groups seeking to establish independent states and is known for his Russia Russia-friendly views.
During her last month visit to Washington, Cvijanovic met with former senior White House aide Steve Bannon at his Washington home, the meeting that Osborne said he did not arrange. He noted that Cvijanovic downplayed SNSD's Russian ties and touted its desire for stronger relations with the US. She wanted to establish a “line of communication that wasn't there before,” Osborne told the Mother Jones.
The magazine concluded that Bosnia was set to hold an election in October this year “amid reports of Russian efforts to encourage ethnic tensions in the country in a bid to undermine the US and European Union policy in the region.” Osborne, according to the magazine, has not signed on to advise the Bosnian Serbs through the election but did not rule out a possibility of doing so.
