SARAJEVO: Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik on Saturday urged negotiations on the workings of the divided Balkan country, or an “amiable separation” from the Muslim-Croat portion should talks fail.

Dodik, who was sentenced on Wednesday to a year in prison for refusing to comply with decisions made by Bosnia’s high representative, has promised to pull the Serb statelet out of Bosnia’s central institutions.

His threats to ban the national police and judiciary from Serb territory led to accusations Dodik was flouting the Dayton accords that ended the 1992-1995 civil war in Bosnia. “We propose again to the (Muslim) Bosniaks to talk... to come back to the original Dayton accords and to find a new accord for Bosnia,” Dodik told a press conference in Banja Luka, the capital of the Bosnian Serb statelet in Bosnia, Republika Srpska.

“If we cannot make it work, then let us agree on an amiable separation,” the Republika Srpska president added. Since the end of the civil war, which claimed nearly 100,000 lives, Bosnia has been divided between two largely autonomous entities, one Serb and one Muslim-Croat.

The case against Dodik, who has pursued a relentless Serb separatist agenda, has further tested the strength of the limited central institutions linking Bosnia’s two halves. Besides a year in prison, the Serb leader was also banned from office for six years for ignoring decisions made by the country’s top envoy charged with overseeing the Dayton accords, Christian Schmidt.

Dodik, 65, has the right to appeal the verdict, which he said was the result of a “political trial”. In response to the sentence, the Serb entity’s parliament passed a raft of bills prohibiting the national police from operating on its territory and rejecting jurisdiction from its central courts.

Published in Dawn, March 2nd, 2025