Prior to the genocide, the areas of northern and eastern BiH that now constitute the entity were wholly multiethnic today they are almost wholly Serb-dominated. He has even threatened to recreate the “ Army of the Republika Srpska” (VRS), the militia that committed the Srebrenica genocide.ĭodik has governed BiH’s RS as a virtual autocrat since 2006. Rather than engage in democratic niceties like parliamentary debate, Dodik has now shifted tactics to creating illegal parallel institutions. In any case, Christian Schmidt, the new High Representative, has said the law imposed by his predecessor would remain in effect until parliament passed its own. Because Dodik sees the HDZ’s goals as a means of further undermining the central BiH state, he is happy to champion the HDZ’s interests. Such an entity existed briefly during the war its entire senior leadership was also convicted of crimes against humanity. While the HDZ is not a secessionist party, they do want to further the ethnic fragmentation of BiH through the creation of a so-called “third entity,” a kind of Croat-dominated RS. The Bosnian parliament failed to pass its own legislation banning genocide denial because of obstruction by Dodik’s SNSD bloc and their coalition partners in the Croat nationalist HDZ. Read Jasmin Mujanovic’s review of “Quo Vadis, Aida,” a “shattering, essential” film about the Srebrenica killings. The New York Times report on the killings, quotes human rights officers and diplomatic officials who described it as “the worst crime since World War II.” Most experts and scholars, however, consider the totality of the Serb nationalist war effort in BiH to have been genocidal in nature, and not isolated merely to the events in Srebrenica. Their convictions are largely concerned with the 1995 genocide in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, where Serb nationalist forces forcibly separated over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys from refugees nominally under the protection of the UN, transferred them to nearby fields and industrial buildings, and gunned them down. Genocide denial is a staple of their politics Dodik’s regime has even funded bogus “ commissions” to cast doubt on the well-established and forensically proven fact that Serb nationalist forces carried out widespread atrocities against Bosniak civilians while under the command of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, both of whom were convicted of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). This means that anyone who denies that Serb nationalist forces committed genocide against Bosniaks during the 1992-95 war is now committing a crime.įor Serb nationalist leaders in BiH, this is an outrage. On Jthe then High Representative, the Sarajevo-based international envoy who oversees the implementation of the 1995 peace agreement, Valentin Inzko, imposed a law banning the denial of all internationally recognized war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocides (like the Holocaust). Officially, Dodik’s secessionist talk is based on his party’s rejection of a new law that criminalizes genocide denial. What does he have to gain by pushing his war-scarred country dangerously close to the brink of another armed conflict? The answers are both cynical and predicated on a mix of political survival and ideology. In practice, the system is marred by dysfunction and near constant obstruction, especially by Dodik and the SNSD. According to that agreement, BiH is governed by a complex ethnic-based power system, which includes a tripartite presidency, wherein one Bosniak, one Serb, and one Croat simultaneously serve on the body and arrive at decisions via consensus. His calls to quit the state’s central institutions are a violation of BiH’s constitution and of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which played a key role in ending the Bosnian War. Most recently, he and his party, the SNSD, have expanded their secessionist rhetoric to include the state police, the border police, and even the country’s constitutional court.ĭodik and his party are paving the way for the RS entity to secede from BiH in all but name. The current tumult was triggered by Milorad Dodik, a Bosnian Serb nationalist politician and notorious demagogue, who has been leading calls for Republika Srpska (RS), the Serb-majority region established after the war, to “ pull out” of the country’s central institutions-its armed forces, intelligence agency, and tax authority. The Balkan state is currently embroiled in its worst political crisis since the 1992-1995 war, the bloodiest on European soil since the Second World War. But his true motives are more cynical and venal.īosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) appears to be coming apart at the seams. Officially, Dodik’s secessionism is in reaction to a new law that bans genocide denial.
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