Accusations made by an opposition politician who claimed the President of Republika Srpska (RS), Bosnia’s Serb-dominated part, physically attacked him on Sunday are the result of a plan to provoke the RS President, RS Interior Minister, Dragan Lukac, said on Monday.
RS President Milorad Dodik and his Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) held a rally in Celinac on Sunday where the cornerstone for the construction of a bridge was being set.
Drasko Stanivukovic, a Party of Democratic Progress (PDP) candidate for the RS parliament, showed up at the event and began recording with his cell phone. Stanivukovic said Dodik's security personnel at some point surrounded him and began cursing at him and that at some point Dodik himself slapped the cell phone out of his hand.
He published a recording of what happened on his Facebook page.
RS Interior Minister Dragan Lukac, who is a member of Dodik’s Party, told reporters at a Monday press conference that PDP Vice-President and Bosnia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Igor Crnadak drove Stanivukovic to the event and that the PDP’s political platform is to ‘provoke and attack the other side so they could in this way win the election.’
Lukac criticised the PDP and said that Stanivukovic is ‘a young man who was abused’ by the PDP leadership.
‘He and other young people who were with him will have criminal complaints submitted against them for disturbing public order, this is data that will be entered into their profiles, which will surely prove damaging to them in the following years,’ Lukac said, adding that if the PDP would ‘miraculously’ win the election, those with the complaints against them will be unable to serve certain positions.
‘Stanivukovic needs to think about who his friends are, those who are pushing him toward such activities,’ he said, accusing Crnadak of ‘abusing the youth for political purposes.’
Dodik did not slap a cell phone out of Stanivukovic’s hand, and neither did anyone else who was there, Lukac said.
‘When there are ongoing political developments where people who want to intentionally cause provocations show up, that brings certain consequences with it,’ he said.
The Minister said that RS Police will not allow anyone to jeopardise campaign activities on either side and that anyone who attempts to do so will be punished.
The RS President is a person under special protection and police had the obligation to act, he said, explaining that it is a provocation when ‘someone with rocks in his pockets’ comes to a place where an opposing political group is meeting is at that moment.
