The Serb member of Bosnia’s tripartite Presidency announced that he will initiate the mechanism of vital national interest to block the Presidency from adopting a decision to grant Kosovo recognition as an independent state.
“I will raise the vital national interest,” Milorad Dodik declared on Thursday, following a Presidency session in which his Bosniak and Bosnian Croat colleagues in the institution, Sefik Dzaferovic and Zeljko Komsic, respectively, voted in favour of recognising Kosovo.
This means that Dodik will ask the parliament of the country’s Serb-majority semi-autonomous Republika Srpska (RS) entity to vote on the matter, which will most likely reject the proposal.
Dodik has repeatedly said that if Kosovo’s independence is recognized, then Republika Srpska should also have the right to secede from Bosnia.
“Kosovo can not be recognised because the RS does not see it as an independent state and can not accept that a different practice is applied in identical situations. The territorial integrity of Serbia is being breached in this case,” he said.
He also accused Bosniak representatives in central institutions of acting independently, making decisions that concern the state on their own.
As an example, he offered a move that Bosnia’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Bisera Turkovic, recently made without consulting her superiors – the tripartite Presidency.
Without asking the Presidency for approval, which she was obliged to do, Turkovic agreed to have Bosnia join the European Commission fight against cybercrime, he said.
He called her move “irresponsible,” and accused Turkovic of violating the Constitution, creating mistrust and “establishing new practices.”
If this goes on, he said, then a significant number of Serbs in Bosnia’s diplomatic missions will start acting in the interest of just the Serb people.
“If they want new practices, they will get that game,” he said, adding that he can not find any case where Serb representatives acted that way.
“Turkovic is irresponsible and contributes the most to the collapse of the system,” he stressed, arguing that this represents the policy of the main Bosniak party in the country, the Party for Democratic Action (SDA).
Dodik also commented on the fact that his proposal to observe a minute of silence for former Bosnian Serb representative in the Presidency, Momcilo Krajisnik, was rejected, accusing his two other colleagues of having “double standards,” having in mind that when former Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic died, the Presidency opened a book of condolences.
The Bosniak and the Croat members of the Presidency said they rejected Dodik’s proposal because Krajisnik was a convicted war criminal and if someone deserves a minute of silence, then it would be his victims.
But Dodik keeps insisting that his two colleagues are applying double standards.
“If this practice is not stopped, I will instruct the heads of consular offices across the world to open books of condolences for Krajisnik, who was the first member of the Presidency representing the Serb people,” Dodik said.