Bosnia’s leader: From moderate to autocrat
Ruler once described by U.S. as ‘breath of fresh air’ hit with sanctions for alleged corruption
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — He was once described in Washington as an anti-nationalist “breath of fresh air” in murderous, genocide-scarred and ethnically divided Bosnia. How times change.
This week, Bosnian Serb political leader Milorad Dodik, now a genocide-denying secessionist, was slapped with new U.S. sanctions for alleged corruption. He responded by saying the days when the United States and other Western democracies “modeled Bosnia to their taste” are long gone.
Accusations he corruptly amassed vast wealth for himself, his relatives and associates, are “monstrous lies,” Dodik claimed.
“The U.S. is a great power, but they are also big liars,” he said.
Dodik maintains the West is punishing him for championing the rights of ethnic Serbs in Bosnia — a dysfunctional country of 3.3 million that’s never truly recovered from a fratricidal war in the 1990s that became a byname for ethnic cleansing and genocide.
The sanctions, Dodik boasted, will just help the Serbs break free of Bosnia into the eager embrace of their “true friends” — Russia, China, the champions of illiberal democracy within the European Union, and neighboring Serbia.
The 63-year-old political science graduate first came to prominence in 1998, as a moderate reformist narrowly elected regional prime minister of Republika Srpska, one of Bosnia’s two postwar administrative units. NATO-led peacekeepers surrounded key buildings held by police loyal to Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic — later convicted of wartime genocide and crimes against humanity — to ensure Dodik could take control.
Shortly after, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met him and “felt like a breath of fresh air had blown through the room,” according to her spokesman at the time.
But in 2001, after losing a presidential election in Republika Srpska, Dodik changed course, refashioning himself as a nationalist hardliner and secessionist. He gradually gained control of all levels of Republika Srpska’s government and, in 2009, managed to expel foreign judges and prosecutors from Bosnia’s court system — amid reports he was under investigation for corruption and erosion of democracy.
Over the years, Dodik weathered countless accusations by national and international rights and media freedom groups of curbing media independence and popularizing vile rhetoric against political opponents of all ethnic stripes. He notoriously defended the 2008 approval, by a regional development bank, of a favorable $2 million loan to a firm co-owned by his son, saying that “was better than letting [the young man] get addicted to drugs.”
His family’s net worth is hard to estimate, but in 2019, Dodik reported annual income and assets worth over $1.36 million, including an 800,000-euro villa in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade. Dodik says claims about his children’s wealth are maliciously overblown by his political opponents.
In recent months, he has repeatedly voiced hope Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban will serve as his bulwark against the “tyranny” of Western democracies, warmly welcoming Orban’s December contention the EU’s main challenge on Bosnia is “how to manage the security of a state in which 2 million Muslims live.”