Serb leader holds defiant rally as tensions escalate
BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Amid Bosnia’s greatest political crisis since the end of its 1992-95 inter-ethnic war, the country’s Serbs celebrated an outlawed holiday Sunday with a provocative parade showcasing armored vehicles, police helicopters and law enforcement officers with rifles, marching in lockstep and singing a nationalist song.
Addressing several thousand spectators gathered in Banja Luka, the de-facto capital of the Serb-run part of the country, Bosnian Serb nationalist leader Milorad Dodik disparaged sanctions Washington slapped on him last week over his alleged corrupt activities and threats to tear the country apart.
“This gathering is the best response to those who deny us our rights, who keep imposing sanctions on us,” Dodik said. “It proves to me that I must listen to you, that you did not elect me to fulfill Americans’ wishes but to fulfill the wishes of Serb people.”
The Jan. 9 holiday commemorates the date in 1992 when Bosnian Serbs declared the creation of their own state in Bosnia, igniting the multi-ethnic country’s devastating, nearly 4-year-long war that became a byname for ethnic cleansing and genocide.
The holiday was banned in 2015 by Bosnia’s top court, which ruled that the date, which falls on a Serb Christian Orthodox religious holiday, discriminates against the country’s other ethnic groups — Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats.
During the war that killed 100,000 people and turned half of the country’s population into refugees, Bosniaks and Croats were persecuted and almost completely expelled from the now Serb-administered half of Bosnia.
After the war, under the terms of the U.S.brokered Dayton peace agreement, Bosnia was divided into two semiautonomous governing entities — Republika Srpska and one dominated by Bosniaks and Croats.
Each part has its own government, parliament and police, but the two are linked by shared, state-wide institutions, including the judiciary, army, security agencies and tax administration. All actions at a national level require consensus from all three ethnic groups.
Dodik has for years been advocating the separation of the Bosnian Serb mini-state from the rest of the country and making it part of neighboring Serbia.