Expected or not, the second-instance verdict in the Dodik and Lukić case had to be delivered for at least two reasons - Milorad Dodik appealed the first-instance verdict, which sentenced him to a year in prison and a six-year ban on political activity, and the Prosecutor's Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina also appealed, mostly because Miloš Lukić, the acting director of the Official Gazette of Republika Srpska, was acquitted. So all subsequent reactions - including those coming from Serbia, as well as Viktor Orban's statement, all the drumbeating about not recognizing the decision of the Court of BiH and its Appellate Council, are completely pointless. Not only because leading politicians from the environment directly interfere in the internal affairs of our country, but primarily because they imply that Aleksandar Vučić and his paramours, just like the Hungarian Prime Minister, would recognize the verdict only if it were in favor of the politician they support! The height of hypocrisy are the claims that the verdict is undemocratic?! What does that even mean?
Courts are governed by the law, and ours, the state one - which Dodik recognizes only when it suits him - has shown excessive flexibility towards the RS leadership, maximally accommodating the trio headed by Dodik again and literally showing favoritism to politicians. It has not been even a month since the SNSD leader appeared before the Court of BiH in the evening hours before the weekend and an arrest warrant was immediately lifted for him, issued because he did not want to respond to the BiH Prosecutor's Office due to the opening of an investigation into the unconstitutional actions of the entity president, prime minister and speaker of the National Assembly.
A process that has yet to begin. After Dodik, the same procedure was applied at lightning speed to his henchmen Radovan Višković and Nenad Stevandić, but at that time neither the Court nor the Prosecutor's Office bothered any of them, nor the fact that the director of OSABiH is not a Serb, although Almir Džuvo considerably degraded his own position by taxing Dodik. Now he can be satisfied, neither guilty nor guilty is the crowning proof that the convicted person really respects state institutions, and he is supported by the speech of the Serbian president who took pity on Dodik's naivety precisely because of this driving.
And in an extraordinary address, which followed after the second-instance verdict was sent, the convicted person's lawyer announced an appeal to the Constitutional Court of BiH, from which - says Goran Bubić - he will also request a temporary measure, all with the aim of postponing his leaving the chair. Anyone who watched and listened more carefully must have noticed several moments that unequivocally confirmed that the stories about the threat to Serbs and the RS are mere platitudes intended to conceal the essence, the attachment to the state manger and the power that the position carries. We have checked, Dodik said extraordinary, I can remain the president of the SNSD! The law is clear: the ban on political activity applies to everything that has any connection with budget financing, so suddenly the insistence on the ban on financing all parties in the RS entity takes on another dimension. It seems that Dodik - no harm done - was preparing in good time for the guilty verdict, which would also explain the fact that this decision is not yet in force. And his look with which he lashed out at Željka Cvijanović, a member of the BiH Presidency, who, while supporting the beloved party president, clearly did not show enough reverence for the victim, said more than any words, but almost joyfully exclaimed that the SNSD would continue.
I was fascinated by the undisguised intoxication with ambition that the convict demonstrated by announcing a new platform that he would prepare in the next six years! Simple calculations show that Dodik's sentence expires in 2031, which means that he is preparing for local elections in 2032! When he probably realized what he had said, he hurried to correct himself as quickly as possible: he hopes that there will be no BiH by then. Well, he has been riding on these hopes for ten years, lying to everyone, whenever and wherever they agree to it, and the truth is that we all suffer - he is the one who systematically blocks BiH's European path, he is the one who, with his defiance, keeps the entire country on the tail of the Balkans - but it is also true that for him and his closest people, family, friends, and associates, asset records have become real brochures.
Because of them, after all, the entire spectrum of companies from RS ended up on the American blacklist, which - ultimately - his comrade Orban refers to, triumphantly stating that Dodik did not fall because of corruption, but because he did not implement certain decisions that came from the EU.
Now that is just shock and disbelief, even more than the announcement of a historic alliance with the Serbs, whatever that means. Especially since Hungary - unlike Dodik - is not renouncing the European Union, and he, we heard him say, resolutely announced the end of any entity participation in BiH's European path. Although this is not the first time, whenever Dodik declares his love for Putin and Russia, he also uses the opportunity to spit and insult the European Union and even bolder it with his own views on the hated West, now he has mixed the cards a little differently.
Namely, shifting blame and denying his own wrongdoings, he began his tirade with his favorite target, former US ambassador to our country Michael Murphy, but as soon as he remembered that just a moment earlier he had announced that he and (the scolded) Željka would write letters to the new Trump administration, he turned all his weapons and vocabulary of insults on Luigi Sorec, Head of the EU Mission to BiH, and European Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Marta Kos. Everything, therefore, that was valid for the USA yesterday, now applies to official Brussels and Great Britain.
Europe - on Dodik's scale of hatred - has also replaced Christian Schmidt, who has turned into a bad luck. To be honest, he has also made a bad luck ending. The pragmatic German, who has been fighting literally everyone since his arrival and is not fair to anyone, has shown that the mandate of the last high representative in this country has been resolved to end in favor of the people and democracy. He - no matter what anyone says - is the least to blame for the politicians not wanting to and not wanting to reach an agreement, and he regularly gave them opportunities and appealed to their loyalty to the people they swear allegiance to every now and then. And he only acted when they themselves had squandered all their chances. When the line is drawn, only Vučić's deputy in the prime minister's chair of Serbia can find it "symptomatic that the verdict was announced at a time when Serbia and RS are marking three decades since Operation Storm", and interpret it as evidence that "someone is bothered by the unity of the Serbian people". I guess he hasn't learned yet that the Serbian world is the populist mantra of his boss, the same one Schmidt doesn't mind and who even these days publicly recalls Serbia's signature on Dayton. After all, Dodik's dearest allies - Croatia and Čović's HDZBiH - have no problem with the verdict, it should be implemented.
That is why the most pragmatic reaction is the one sublimated by Igor Crnadak, a PDP MP in the RS National Assembly, who - in addition to not agreeing that anyone identifies RS with a single politician - strongly opposes advocating a boycott of the elections, which will be inevitable when the Central Election Commission (CEC) strips Dodik of his mandate as entity president. Do we have the right to "give" this regime another year, he asks, not agreeing that all the rigged tenders, prointers, godfather buildings, houses in Portorož, villas in Dedinje, deliberately lost arbitrations, destroyed public enterprises, young people who fled from here, a disrupted value system and other difficult-to-repair damage caused to society in RS will be forgotten overnight.
And indeed, no matter how much Dodik tries to turn the verdict into a punishment for RS, the entity - like the whole of BiH - is being punished with them in power. This is an opportunity for the whole country to show that it can do things differently and accelerate its European path, catch the last wagon of the last train for the Growth Plan and that billion that - even reduced by ten percent - goes to projects intended for everyone, not just some. After all, those are the ones most similar to Dodik and proven obstacles to the path to the EU and any progress.
Bonus video:
