Serb Republic leader does not see unified Bosnia in EU

Milorad Dodik says all three sides pursuing wartime goals with politics

Bosnian Catholic Franciscan nuns smile as they welcome guests during the opening of a new orphanage in the town of Vares, 50 kilometers north of Sarajevo, yesterday. As the war-torn Balkan country fights poverty, Franciscan nuns from all over the region gathered for a religious ceremony to bless an orphanage they built using donations from all over the world.

By Irena Knezevic - The Associated Press

BANJA LUKA – The leader of the Bosnian Serbs said he believes Bosnia can enter the European Union only as a loose federation of two or three ethnic-based ministates but under no circumstances as a unified country.

Milorad Dodik told The Associated Press in an interview yesterday that the Bosnian Serbs would rather forgo EU membership than lose their separate ministate within Bosnia.

“We want to enter Europe only if we can keep our specificity, our autonomy” said the prime minister of the Bosnian Serb ministate, Republika Srpska, which comprises Bosnia-Herzegovina along with a Bosnian Croat federation.

For years, the country’s Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks have argued over how Bosnia’s political setup could be changed to make the country more functional and fit EU membership requirements.

This has delayed reforms and Bosnia has made very little progress since it signed a pre-membership agreement with the EU last year.

“It’s difficult to find a compromise,” Dodik said, comparing the situation to that in the former Yugoslavia, where various nations could not find a way to live together and ultimately the country fell apart into six separate national countries. The seventh, Bosnia-Herzegovina, was an ethnically mixed Yugoslav republic where Christian Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians lived together.

A war that took 100,000 lives was fought between 1992-95 over the country’s future.

The United States brokered a peace agreement in 1995 in Dayton, Ohio, that preserved the country’s international borders but divided it into two ministates – one for the Serbs the other shared by Bosnians and Croats. The two are linked into a state by common institutions.

The agreement proved to be good enough to stop the war but not to ensure a functioning country.

“Only Bosnia was given the destiny of the former Yugoslavia. Nations that could not find a way to live together in Yugoslavia were supposed to live together in a hybrid country in which everybody pursued his own agenda,” he said.

All three sides continued to pursue their wartime goals though political means – the Bosnians to eliminate the ethnic division, the Croats to get their own ministate and the Serbs to keep as much autonomy as they could, Dodik said.

“The entire political debate and all relations in Bosnia are moving in this circle,” he added. “I have no objections to the creation of a third (Croat) entity but it cannot cross over into Republika Srpska,” Dodik said.

In general, the Bosnian Serbs “believe that Bosnia can be a federal state, comprising federal units,” where most of the power lies with the federal units, not the central government.

His biggest opponent, Bosniak leader Haris Silajdzic, has repeatedly said the Serb ministate was created through ethnic cleansing and genocide. To the outrage of the Bosnian Serbs, he last year asked the United Nations to erase the results of genocide by erasing Bosnia’s ethnic division. But to any international or domestic efforts to transfer authority from the Serb ministate to the central institutions, the Serbs replied with threats to block the functioning of the country entirely by withdrawing their representatives from the central institutions.