Christian Schmidt asks for the “immediate cessation of all the activities that undermine Dayton's peace agreement.”
The high international representative of Bosnia accused the political leaders of the Autonomous Serbian region of the search to destabilize the country, after the ESTELET approved legislation to prohibit the Bosnian National Police and Judicial.
The legislators of Republika Srpska, the SERBIA Autonomous Republic of the country, approved the legislation on Thursday after a state court prohibited its separatist leader Milorad Dodik from politics for six years and sentenced it to one year in prison for refusing to comply with the decisions taken by the high representative, Christian Schmidt.
The separatist gambit could trigger a constitutional crisis in Bosnia of ethnically divided postwar.
Schmidt, who has the task of supervising the Dayton agreements that ended the 1992-95 intercommunal war between Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Muslims Bosnians who killed more than 100,000 people, accused the political leaders of the autonomous region of undermining the State.
Dayton's agreements divided Bosnia into two autonomous regions: a Muslim-crunchy Federation and the Srpska Republic dominated by the Serbs.
A weak central government connects these regions under the high representative, which has significant powers, including the ability to fire political leaders.
Schmidt requested on Friday the “immediate cessation of all the activities that undermine the Dayton Peace Agreement and the constitutional and legal order of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” according to a brochure of his office.
“These actions of the ruling coalition in Republika Srpska seek to destabilize institutions that exercise constitutional responsibilities of the State,” the statement added.
Dodik was accused in 2023 after signing legislation suspending the decisions of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Schmidt, thus breaking the peace agreement.
Dodik, who long ago requested that the region separate and form a union with neighboring Serbia, rejected the court ruling and urged legislators in the Autonomous Republic of Serb to vote to prohibit the police and the state judiciary.
“We believe that this creates impulse to make this without the use of force,” said Dodik, adding that the region aims to make the reforms and create a state judiciary, the police and the army to counteract secessionist tendencies.
After Thursday's vote, the Serbian parliamentary president of Bosnia, Nenad Stevendend, said that 49 of the 52 deputies in the assembly supported the legislation.
However, the Prime Minister of the Muslim region of Bosnia, Nermin Niksic, criticized Dodik's impulse to prohibit the country's institutions on Friday.
“I am not ready to participate in any talk or discuss continuous political cooperation with the institutions of Republika Srpska until all these actions against the Constitution, the Dayton Peace Agreement and the State stops and annuls,” Nikesic said on social networks.
The Bosnian Muslim member of the tripartite presidency, Denis Becirovic, also condemned Dodik and Republic Srpska officials, saying that their movements were an “attack against the constitutional order of the country.”
