The upcoming session of the Republika Srpska entity parliament will call upon the entity's right to self-determination because no territorial reorganisation is acceptable to the ruling party – the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD), Bosnia's Serb Presidency member and party leader Milorad Dodik said Wednesday.
The SNSD scheduled an urgent session on Wednesday where, among other things, they planned to dismiss the RS parliament's Deputy Speaker coming from the largest Bosniak party – the Democratic Action Party (SDA) Senad Bratic, following his party's congress at which they adopted a declaration saying the party would support the idea of unified Bosnia under the name of Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and its EU and NATO accession.
This caused a wave of condemnation from both major Serb and Croat parties, saying that any kind of territorial reorganisation was unacceptable and against the Constitution.
“We find it unacceptable that someone from the SDA can receive a salary from the RS and yet vote against it,” SNSD leader Milorad Dodik said moments after Bratic resigned.
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Submitting his irrevocable resignation, Bratic stated that he did it so the entire situation would not turn into a “nationalist narrative targeting Bosniaks.”
“Once he (Bratic) saw that we initiated the dismissal procedure and that it is a done deal, he filed his resignation. The SNSD will suggest their own candidate for the RS National Assembly Deputy Speaker,” Dodik pointed out.
Following the Bosnian war 1992-1995, Bosnia was internally divided into two entities – the Serb Dominated Republika Srpska (RS) and the Federation which is shared by Bosniaks and Croats, hut the Dayton Peace Agreement which ended the war and serves as the country's constitution stipulates that certain percentage of minority peoples must constitute the government in each entity.
One of the SDA deputy leaders and head of the “Together for BiH” caucus in the RS parliament Edin Ramic reacted to the events in the RS saying the SNSD's initiative to dismiss Bratic represents their inability to manage the post-election processes constructively and that he will “request that the SDA leadership takes into consideration today's events initiated by the SNSD during future government formation talks.”
“The dismissal initiative will only contribute to the SNSD officials suffering the consequences for their leader Milorad Dodik's attitudes. The aim of this initiative is obviously to bring the current political processes to an ethnic level, to present it as a clash between peoples and from there to try to find some kind of Serb unity in the RS, which would be transferred to the Council of Ministers (the Bosnian parliament),” Ramic said, adding that his party, the SDA, will not play that game because those clashes are behind them.
