Dodik: “We will do nothing to jeopardize peace"

Interview with the President of the Srpska Republic, Milorad Dodik, on the ongoing political crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Interview by Prof. Srdja Trifkovic

Bosnia and Herzegovina has recently returned to the spotlight due to the consequences of a highly debated trial held in Sarajevo. The case concerns the President of the Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, who was recently found guilty by the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina for alleged violations of decrees issued by the international High Representative.

Christian Schmidt, the current High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina and a former middle-ranking German politician, is a figure whose appointment has been contested not merely by some local political actors, but also by Russia and China. Those two permanent members of the Security Council question the legitimacy of his mandate and powers because his appointment has never been endorsed by the UNSC - as it was clearly supposed to be - according to the Dayton Agreement. During his tenure, he has often been criticized for seeking to undermine the Serbian Republic by making decisions which were clearly geared towards the eventual centralization of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Schmidt has thus undermined the Dayton agreement, which - ironically - is the accusation he and his proteges in Sarajevo are leveling against Dodik.

One of the main concerns, particularly from the authorities of the Republika Srpska, is that some of the High Representative's decisions may undermine the autonomy guaranteed by the Dayton Agreement, which ended the war in the 1990s and established the country’s current institutional framework.

Milorad Dodik is an elected leader of the Republika Srpska and views recent measures taken against him as a threat to the autonomy of the entity he represents. The issue has become a central point in the country’s political debate.

In this context, scholar Srdja Trifković traveled to Banja Luka, the capital of the Republika Srpska – one of the two entities that make up Bosnia and Herzegovina – to hear President Dodik’s perspective on the controversy, a viewpoint that has been largely absent from international media. The interview was conducted before authorities in Sarajevo issued a warrant for Dodik’s arrest.

Prof. Srdja Trifkovic: Ever since the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement which ended the Bosnian war in the fall of 1995, we have witnessed persistent demands from various Western powers for its revision to the detriment of the Serb Republic (Republika Srpska). Mr. President, since you have been prominently present on the political scene here for almost three decades, how do you account for these constant efforts to curtail the autonomy of the Serb entity, and effectively to turn Bosnia and Herzegovina into a centralized state in which the Muslims would be dominant?

President Milorad Dodik:       Back in late 1995, from the outset, the intention was to draw the Serbs to the negotiating table, to offer them an agreement at the Dayton peace conference which granted them a significant degree of self-rule, and – once it was signed – to try to revise it.

Almost two decades ago I attended a meeting, together with the Muslim member of the collective Bosnian Presidency, Haris Silajdžić, with then-U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns (served 2005-2008). Silajdžić complained to Burns that the U.S. had literally cheated them (the Muslim side) by failing to deliver on the promise of a centralized Bosnian state, “one hundred percent B-H” as they called it. “But don’t you see,” Burns replied, “that we are working on it?” This was a remarkable admission.

It is evident that successive U.S. administrations, and especially the Democrats when in power, have sought to undermine the Dayton Agreement. They have insisted that the Agreement has only ten basic articles, and that its eleven annexes are peripheral. Those annexes are in fact the key to the agreement itself, but they (various U.S. officials) always insisted on its “framework.”

The Venice Commission (legal advisory body of the Council of Europe) ruled as far back as 2005 that the Serb Republic was a party to the Dayton Agreement, but the U.S. always tried to ignore its findings. The Commission further ruled that the Annexes are an integral part of the Agreement, and that they can only be changed with the agreement of all contracting parties.

 Already in 1997, when it became obvious that the Serb side was unwilling to accept revision of the Dayton Agreement, they instituted a new mechanism at a conference in Bonn. It was supposed to grant a new set of powers to the office of the international High Representative, the nominal overseer of the Dayton treaty, and in the process, they exploited the geostrategic balance of forces which was prevalent at that time. A succession of these “high representatives” started imposing laws which had no basis in the Dayton Agreement, none whatsoever.

Two issues are problematic here. First of all, the “High Representative” had never been the authorized source of some new legislation, and that person (whoever he happened to be at any moment in time) was violating the constitution by initiating any legislation. Secondly, without the agreement of all contracting parties he could not change the constitutional arrangements.

The foreign powers-that-be tried to claim that this was nevertheless legal because some political parties at that time had voted to enact the change in the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This was not true, however: those political parties were not the contracting parties to the agreement itself. In any event, the “parliamentary assembly” of Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a proper parliament, it is composed of the delegates from the entities. All this was done in violation of the constitution, adding to it, seeking to change it. Now we are in a very delicate situation. There is a “Bosnia,” which has its constitution, but which functions apart from it…

ST:       You have mentioned the Democrats in the U.S., who seem to have a strange fixation with what some of their leading lights have called the “unfinished business in the Balkans,” meaning above all unitarization of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It could have been expected that, with Donald Trump’s re-election last November, a new era would start. Do you think that an opportunity still exists to correct this narrative?

MD:     We should not cherish high ambitions in this respect; but what we have heard, directly from Trump and from different members of his team – including his assertion that the Biden Administration was the worst in U.S. history – is significant. If that administration has done so much harm to America, you can only imagine how much harm it has done elsewhere. Leaving that chaos as-is, and calling it “finished business,” really would not be fair or rational.

The disorder left by the Biden Administration, especially in the last few years, is a true quagmire for us here, Serbs first and foremost. This indicates that the remnants of the globalist deep state, which Trump is fighting in the U.S., are still strongly present here. It is to be expected that he will not stop at what has been done so far. We have heard Trump’s team say that USAID is a criminal organization, and its operations here have been significantly curtailed, which should significantly make life easier for us.

Suffice to say that from $402 million supposedly sent to Bosnia and Herzegovina only $156 million have been accounted for, everything else went to some unknown parties. They used part of this money to finance the Office of the High Representative, which is operating illegally. The question arises: how the money of U.S. taxpayers can be used to finance a German person who has no mandate of the United Nations, not even of the U.S. government as such, but who did have the “mandate” of the Biden power structure?

I don’t believe that will be allowed to remain this way and I trust that the time will come for a proper examination of this issue. We have expected greater speed, however. We are trying to understand the modus operandi of this new administration. We believe that what they are doing with the civil service is important. That is what harmed this first administration, the actions of those civil servants who were loyal to the deep state and not to their new president.

We take note, in particular, of the anti-globalist statements by the vice-president, of the notions that America should come home and not dictate affairs of other countries, but we still do not see that reflected here. We heard a statement by Secretary of State Marco Rubio a few days ago, which used the old vocabulary. We are aware that this reflects the continued presence of the pro-Muslim lobby in the old structures.

It may be too much to expect that a new leaf will be turned, that from now on all will be different, but in the new climate and the new geopolitical reordering we can seek a new position for ourselves. The Serbs should finally give up on the illusion that someone will grant them something. They need to recognize the moment and do something good for themselves.

ST:       In his Munich speech JD Vance mentioned not once but twice the Romanian presidential candidate Georgescu and the way in which he was practically eliminated from the race through the abuse of the judicial apparatus. Can a parallel be drawn with your case?

MD:     I think it's the same, exactly the same story. Today we see what's happening in Romania: whoever doesn't fit into that deep state, in this case European, and even if they recognize him as not being one of their own, he's immediately in court. I'm already at an advanced stage, and every day I receive new statements from the prosecutor's office. It is incredible that a Central Election Commission can ban a citizen for trivial reasons from competing in the elections. This can only be interpreted as an attempt to prevent an unwanted victory.

That is how I understood Vice President Vance’s address in Munich: as a call for Europe to come to its senses, specifically that it cannot simply ban democratically elected individuals and parties. We should also remember the treatment of the AfD in Germany, which they also tried to ban and still keep beyond the “firewall.” The parallel between what is happening in Romania and what is happening here absolutely exists, it is in fact identical. I may add that it started with me long before what we have now in Romania, but of course Romania is more visible.

ST:       The campaign against you in political Sarajevo is heating up. How do you see the possibility of calming it down and a long-term solution?

MD:     Our policy is not to jeopardize peace, not under any conditions, but that does not mean that we should stop fighting politically for things that we think are right. We resist the laws that are anti-constitutional, that are not provided for by the Dayton Agreement. We didn't touch anything that belongs to Bosnia and Herzegovina, its jurisdiction over relations with foreign countries, its control over the county’s airspace, its Central Bank that is provided for in the Constitution, but nothing beyond that.

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