The auxiliary police unit Republika Srpska (RS, Bosnia's Serb-majority entity) wants to form pending the entity parliament's approval will not be established immediately as it will only be included in the 2020 budget, RS Prime Minister Radovan Viskovic said on Monday.
The Government of Republika Srpska, one of the two semi-autonomous entities within Bosnia and Herzegovina, adopted end of March changes to the law on police which introduced an auxiliary police unit in the entity. The draft was forwarded to the RS National Assembly for adoption.
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“We are not planning to form that police unit right after the law is adopted as this requires significant funds,” said Viskovic. “We will do this gradually and I am not against the Federation doing the same thing.”
But the news was met with strong criticism in the other entity, the Federation (FBiH), which is mostly shared between Bosniaks and Croats.
Some Bosniak politicians fear that the plan is to turn the new unit into a military formation.
Bakir Izetbegovic, the leader of the main Bosniak party in the country, the Party for Democratic Action (SDA), expressed concern that Dodik and RS authorities are “arming the entity police with military firearms, planning the formation of a reserve police unit and other things.”
Nihad Colpa, the leader of the left-leaning Civic Alliance, said he believes the additional RS police unit will, in fact, be an “RS infantry,” and its formation would breach the 1995 agreement which ended the Bosnian War and contains the country’s Constitution.
Viskovic explained that the task of the additional police unit would be to respond to safety challenges such as a migrant crisis and natural disasters and “not for some internal conflicts.”
