Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik committed a crime on several occasions when he spoke about changing borders in the Balkans and it is worrying that neither Bosnia’s prosecutors nor international institutions are doing anything about it, MP in Bosnia’s upper house, Zlatko Miletic, told N1 on Saturday.
Hardline nationalist Dodik is currently the Chairman of Bosnia’s tripartite Presidency after for years serving as either Prime Minister or President of the country’s Serb-majority semi-autonomous entity of Republika Srpska (RS). He has frequently advocated for the RS to secede from Bosnia and possibly become part of neighbouring Serbia.
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During an interview he gave in April, he redrew the borders between Bosnia and Serbia, saying that some kind of integration between Serbia, the RS entity and the Serb-dominated part of Montenegro must happen in the future.
“I respect him (Dodik) as a person and I think he is a successful politician but that doesn’t mean he can behave the way he has been behaving throughout the past several years,” said Miletic, who is a member of the Croat club of representatives in the House of Peoples.
Dodik’s redrawing of borders is a criminal act and there are videos of him doing it in interviews on at least three occasions, he said, calling it “worrying.”
“The behaviour of institutions which are not doing anything about it is worrying, most of all the OHR (Office of the High Representative) and the EU,” he said, adding that he doesn’t “even want to speak about the Prosecutor’s Office.”
The High Representative is the international official named by the international community to oversee the implementation of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the Bosnian war and contains the country's Constitution.
“Every prosecutor who heard such a statement has the obligation to treat it as an indication that he (Dodik) has committed a crime,” Miletic added.
The lawmaker, who is a member of the Democratic Front (DF), one of the parties in the new ruling coalition which is yet to form the government, also touched upon the Membership Action Plan (MAP) – an important step Bosnia needs to take if it wants to become a NATO member country.
Years ago Bosnia expressed the desire to join NATO and has been working on fulfilling the conditions for membership.
But Dodik and his ruling Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) have meanwhile changed their mind and now say they will not let the country join as long as neighbouring Serbia does not join. Serbia declared military neutrality.
The issue has become an obstacle to the formation of the new government – in Bosnia called the Council of Ministers – after the election last October.
The new Bosniak and Croat members of the tripartite Presidency said that they will greenlight only a new prime minister who is ready to work on NATO membership.
It is the Serb’s turn to take the post but the proposed candidate has already said he won’t support the country’s NATO path.
SNSD spokesperson Radovan Kovacevic said on Saturday that his party supports cooperation with NATO only if it will mirror the way Serbia cooperates with the organisation.
Miletic said his side will “not back off” from activating the MAP, saying it was “important for that process to begin.”
“There are different types of cooperation with NATO, even countries which Dodik mentioned have better cooperation with it than Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Miletic said, adding that Bosnia has an obligation to continue its path towards membership in the Alliance due to decisions which were adopted earlier.
“If they don’t like that law, then they should change it and abolish decisions they adopted earlier by voting on it, and there is no problem,” Miletic said.
