Dodik to back off his threat to form a separate ethnic Serb army.Īmong many Bosnians, however, fear is again on the march. Schmidt, in a recent interview, played down the risk of a return to bloodletting and said he expected Mr. A report in October by the United Nations’ senior official in Bosnia, Christian Schmidt of Germany, described the situation as “the greatest existential threat” to the country’s survival since the early 1990s. Dodik has made noises about Serb secession for more than a decade but has never before prompted such a volatile crisis. Dzaferovic, who represents Bosnian Muslims, known as Bosniaks, and Zeljko Komsic, an ethnic Croat. The deal stopped the fighting but created an elaborate and highly dysfunctional political system, with a weak central authority in which different ethnic groups share power. The frictions in Bosnia are rooted in the 1995 Dayton peace agreement, brokered by the United States. Russia, which wants to prevent Bosnia from joining the bloc or NATO, is already siding with Mr. ![]() Now the United States and the European Union, which Bosnia aspires to join, are desperate to stop the new crisis from escalating into conflict, or creating the sort of political instability that Russia could exploit. Those Balkan wars left roughly 140,000 people dead, drew in NATO warplanes and soldiers and created a rift between Russia and the West that remains today. It was in Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, that a teenage Serb nationalist set off World War I by assassinating an Austrian archduke in June 1914, and where the seemingly deranged rants of a Serb psychiatrist, Radovan Karadzic, presaged a three-year spree of bloodletting in the 1990s. “It will not be peaceful,” warned Sefik Dzaferovic, one of Bosnia’s three presidents, each elected to represent a particular ethnic group.Ī patchwork of different peoples and religions, Bosnia has long been a tinderbox for larger conflagrations. Some foreign diplomats and rival politicians see his secessionist threats as primarily a means to deflect from allegations of corruption.īut in a region where the shadow of war is everywhere, many Bosnians fear that the country’s peace is under threat. He also wants out of the state’s tax agency, its intelligence service and its judiciary, vowing to accelerate what he calls the “peaceful dissolution” of a Bosnian state birthed by a peace deal forged in 1995 in Dayton, Ohio.īosnian investigators have traced the oxygen shipments to a company controlled by one of Mr. Since then, he has threatened to pull out of Bosnia’s multiethnic armed forces and form his own, exclusively Serb army. Dodik announced that he was creating his own medicines agency and withdrawing his fief, which covers roughly half of Bosnia’s territory, from the oversight of central government inspectors.
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