SARAJEVO (Reuters) – NATO fully supports Bosnia’s territorial integrity and political leaders should resolve tensions that have been fuelled by a jail sentence imposed on the president of the Bosnian Serb region, the alliance’s Secretary-General Mark Rutte said on Monday.
Tensions have been running high in Bosnia since a court last month sentenced the Serb region’s pro-Russian president, Milorad Dodik, to one year in jail and banned him from politics for six years. He rejected the verdict and the Serb regional parliament barred the national police and judiciary from its territory.
The verdict prompted the European Union’s peacekeeping mission, EUFOR, to announce a temporary increase in the size of its 1,100-strong force in the country.
Rutte said NATO would not allow a security vacuum to develop and that disrespect for Bosnia’s peace deal and constitution was “not acceptable”.
He was referring to the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the 1992-95 war in which 100,000 people were killed. It left Bosnia divided into two regions – the Bosniak-Croat Federation and the Serb republic, or Republika Srpska, with weak central institutions.
“We will not allow hard-won peace to be jeopardized,” Rutte told reporters after meeting Bosnia’s tripartite presidency and urging its three members to “take responsibility”.
“This country is looking at the three of you. Make this country proud of this presidency and solve this problem,” he said.
Bosnia’s constitutional court last Friday temporarily suspended separatist laws passed by the Bosnian Serb parliament on Dodik’s orders. The court said those laws endanger Bosnia’s constitutional order and sovereignty.
Critics say Dodik, who has long called for the Serb Republic to break away and form a union with neighbouring Serbia, has been a destabilising force who has fuelled the kind of ethnic and political tensions that tore Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s.
But he has allies in Russia, in Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Moscow has called the Bosnian court’s ruling “a strike on stability in the Balkan region”.
(Reporting by Daria Sito-Sucic; Writing by Ivana Sekularac, editing by Gareth Jones)
