Serb member of Bosnia and Herzegovina's tripartite Presidency Milorad Dodik said he would keep on insisting on being guarded by the police of Republika Srpska (RS), Bosnia's entity he is representing in the state Presidency.
Dodik's statement came as a response to a document signed by the chief of the state agency for coordination of police bodies, Mirsad Vilic, saying that no police agency except the state police is allowed to bring the weapon into the Presidency building.
Until he was inaugurated to the tripartite state Presidency on November 20, Dodik was the President of Bosnia's Serb-dominated semi-autonomous entity, RS. A day after he took the office, he said he distrusts the state-level-institutions and does not want the state bodies to guard him.
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According to former Deputy Chief of Bosnia's Directorate for Coordination of Police Bodies, Uros Pena, Dodik's request is legitimate. However, he said, the RS police cannot do it alone.
“It is the fact that one agency alone cannot individually provide this sort of security but it has to cooperate. How can they assess the security situation if they don't use the data of all agencies in Bosnia and Herzegovina?”, Pena told EuroBlic daily newspaper.
The RS police, he added, is capable of doing it but in order to do that they have to use the data of the state Intelligence-Security Agency, the State Investigation and Protection Agency and other law enforcement agencies.
