Three decades after the Srebrenica genocide, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is facing a serious political crisis. Milorad Dodik's separatist rhetoric, Russian influence and a slow European path are further deepening internal divisions. An analysis by the respected Financial Times (FT) warns of the real danger of the country's destabilization, while the international community is still searching for a way to respond to threats that threaten stability in the region.
For an international outcast, Dodik is a real traveler, writes the British newspaper, referring to the "free movement" of the President of Republika Srpska (RS) in recent months, despite the arrest warrant that was lifted at the end of last week after Dodik appeared and gave a statement before state institutions.
In late March, just days after a warrant was issued for his arrest for opposing the post-war settlement of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the RS leader hopped on a plane to the Russian capital to meet with Vladimir Putin. A little over a month later, he returned there to join a diverse group of politicians marking the 80th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over the Nazis.
The Kremlin has long been fond of nurturing an axis of pro-Russian irredentists and sympathizers on the fringes of Europe. The courtship of Dodik highlights why, three decades after the end of the war in Bosnia, European officials are frantically refocusing on the small, still ethnically divided country, worried that trouble is brewing there again.
“This is the biggest political crisis in 30 years,” said a senior Western official in the region. “It is not yet a security crisis, but it is very serious, especially because it is not sudden, but is getting worse. Dodik is the biggest single threat to BiH,” he warned.
The FT writes that since the end of the 1990s war, Bosnia's politics have lurched from crisis to crisis and remain divided along ethnic lines. Now officials and diplomats worry that the weak central government established by the Dayton peace agreement is close to breaking point.
Russia has an easy way to provoke Bosnia and Herzegovina
At the center of the drama is 66-year-old Dodik, who is brazenly challenging the structures of the agreement that has preserved stability in Bosnia - and taking steps that could pave the way for RS to secede, the analysis says. It adds that Western officials fear that Russia could exploit the tensions to stir up trouble in Europe's backyard and that, unless Dodik is stopped, Bosnia will face a new chapter of instability.
“If Dodik wins, the emperor (BiH and its Western partners) will be exposed naked,” says one Western diplomat.
"The Russians have an easy way to provoke a reaction here, and if they estimate that they can provoke a response from BiH, they will take advantage of that opportunity."
All of this creates a somber backdrop for the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, the first genocide in Europe to be recognized by the UN since the Holocaust, the FT points out.
Bosnia is now at a “turning point,” says Igor Crnadak, an opposition politician in the RS parliament. “Moscow is using Dodik. His regime has done a lot of damage and this is an opportunity for something new. The question is whether BiH will turn irreversibly towards the West... or whether RS will slide into complete autocracy,” he warned.
Almasa Salihović understands very well what the stakes are in the game in BiH.
Four years ago, Salihović, then a primary school teacher in eastern Bosnia, answered a call from an unknown number. The voice on the other end of the line quickly got to the point. “Are you Abdulah’s brother or sister?” she remembers asking. “We have a DNA match to you for two thigh bones.”
And she was indeed Abdulah's sister. She last saw her brother on July 11, 1995, in Srebrenica. Abdulah, then 18, was one of more than 8.000 Muslim men and boys rounded up and killed by Bosnian Serbs, then secretly buried in mass graves scattered across the region.
After 13 years of not knowing his fate, Salihović learned in 2008 that some of her brother's remains had been dug up in a mass grave. Then, in 2021, a call came saying that more remains had been found.
“It was quite painful to know that he was dead and that it was impossible to find him,” Salihović says. “It’s more comforting to have a grave to mourn over. When we saw a piece of his shorts, it was almost more painful than not having any remains at all,” he adds.
Salihović, who works at the Srebrenica Memorial Center, worries that after progress was made in the first decade after the war towards a general acceptance of the terrible truth about Srebrenica, denial is gaining momentum.
In Srebrenica, where she lives, she regularly encounters Serbs who downplay the crimes. “It’s always the same story, ‘The whole world is against the Serbian nation,’” she says. “In the last two years, I’ve started to fear how easily people are deceived by politicians who go back to history and try to incite nationalism.”
The FT writes that few have stoked religious and ethnic divisions as persistently as Dodik. It recalls that he was initially seen in the West as someone who brought a more liberal spirit to Bosnian Serb politics, and that US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called him “a breath of fresh air” in 1998.
I began to fear how easily people are deceived by politicians who go back to history and try to incite nationalism.
However, in the last fifteen years, Dodik has increasingly turned to stoking Serbian nationalism, the FT reports, recalling that he and Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić last year condemned a UN resolution declaring July 11 as the day of remembrance for the victims of Srebrenica and used it as an excuse to suggest that the world is persecuting Serbs.
A court in Sarajevo in February sentenced Dodik to a six-year ban from politics and a year in prison for challenging the decisions of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He ignored the ruling. The FT says the big question is whether central authorities will try to enforce the ruling and risk a showdown with RS security forces. Dodik is traveling with an armed militia escort who have already had a tense standoff with the state police.
Christian Schmidt, the current High Representative, who was a minister in the German government under Angela Merkel, is cautious about implementing the rulings and says he would prefer to see Dodik lose the election. He sees this as a “serious but solvable” crisis.
'Slow train' to the EU - the greatest hope for BiH
His dream is to oversee the transformation of Bosnia and Herzegovina into a functioning state ready to join the EU, and to eventually step down as the last High Representative. Abolishing his post, the FT writes, is one of the key reforms if the country wants a chance of qualifying for EU membership, which, according to polls, the majority of citizens want.
The FT states that the all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022 gave new momentum to the EU's eastward expansion, after years in which the candidacy of the six Western Balkan countries was stalled.
But Schmidt acknowledges that most believe that the Dayton system, despite its shortcomings, will have to be maintained for some time to come, and that BiH still has a lot of work to do to qualify for EU membership.
"Long-time observers tell me to count on another 20 years (if I want to be the last High Representative)," he joked.
Opposition politician Mladen Ivanić says BiH's best hope is the idea of two-stage EU membership, supported by France, which could allow Balkan states to be on the "slow train" and accept some of the EU's obligations and benefits. He argues that officials in Brussels and Sarajevo like to pretend that full membership is realistic.
"Europe is lying to us. We are lying to them. Europe says the door is open. The reality is that it is not realistic for a long time yet," he says.
Despite all the problems with the Dayton Agreement, it preserved peace. People forget its successes too easily, says Nedžma Džananović, a professor of political science at the University of Sarajevo.
"Even Dodik understands that some things must not be repeated."
However, she fears that Dodik is going unpunished.
"We are actually normalizing the final division of the country. Dodik accepts the national currency and tax money, but the rest of the BiH institutions do not exist for him in the RS," she said.
After more than a decade in which BiH disappeared from the international agenda, European officials are showing increasing concern, the British newspaper reports, recalling that EUFOR increased the number of its soldiers this year.
While Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban blocked a unified EU approach, several member states, and the United Kingdom, which is taking a leading role in the region, imposed sanctions on Dodik.
The FT writes that Western officials hope that more moderate Bosnian Serb politicians will replace Dodik and introduce a spirit of cooperation. But with Bosnian Croat leaders also pushing for greater autonomy, the Dayton Accords are dangerously flawed, if not dysfunctional.
The analysis says that for the generation that grew up after the war, especially in the cosmopolitan heart of Sarajevo, this paralysis is maddening - as is the country's notorious political corruption. BiH is tied with Belarus in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, and this year recorded its worst score yet.
Dayton - a system built for corruption
Meanwhile, young people are leaving BiH and the post-war population has fallen from a peak of 4,2 million in 2002 to just over three million today.
“Corruption is so deeply rooted in the pores of society that it still shocks me,” says Gordana Miladinović, coordinator of an anti-corruption organization who grew up in Sarajevo while it was under siege during the war. “It is part of the culture and contributes to the disintegration of society, values and morality.”
"Add to that the lack of general criminal justice. It seems to me that the more criminal you are, the easier it is to get away with it. Many people enter politics for personal gain," he adds.
The Dayton system, he continues, is so complex with its multiple layers of government that it is “built for corruption”.
Franjo Topić, a prominent academic in Sarajevo who has long advocated for a multiethnic state, believes the solution is to abolish the entities and have a centralized state. “The entities were a good way to stop the war,” he says. “But now we need Dayton, two states would work better. The entities are not a good solution, they are like two small states,” he points out.
However, Miladinović believes that there are too many interest groups that want the system to survive and that the dysfunction will only continue. “A fundamental change to Dayton is unlikely,” Miladinović believes.
Corruption is so deeply rooted in the pores of society that it still shocks me. It's part of the culture.
The FT also states that there is a "Putin Cafe" on the main street in Banja Luka, and that this sight contributes to the impression that both the leaders of RS and Russia want to propagate, of an alliance based on supposedly shared Russian and Serbian values as Slavs and Orthodox Christians.
Dodik’s opponents downplay Russian support for Dodik as more symbolic than practical. “Russia doesn’t have time to think about Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Ivanić says. “They have too many problems in their neighborhood. What are they investing here? Almost nothing. I’ve never seen any long-term strategic game here.”
Dodik himself denies that he wants secession. “You won't find any of my taxes going in that direction, nor will you find a single such statement,” he told Euronews Serbia last month.
In a rare concession, he appeared at a court hearing on Friday, prompting Bosnian prosecutors to lift an arrest warrant for him. But analysts in Banja Luka and Sarajevo fear his ambition is to create a de facto Western Balkan equivalent of Transnistria, a separatist enclave in Moldova that is backed by Moscow.
The British newspaper reminds us that two years ago, Dodik pushed through a controversial law in the RS parliament that effectively meant he no longer recognized the central constitutional court. He is now planning a referendum on a draft of a new RS constitution, the provisions of which would amount to secession.
He has recently pushed through laws to curb civil society and the media, following the autocratic playbook of Orban and Putin.
“Institutions are collapsing,” says Ivana Korajlić, head of Transparency International’s office in Banja Luka. “If you look at the rule of law, we had a stronger approach 20 years ago. Since then, the international presence and pressure in BiH has weakened, and local elites and clientelistic networks have taken control. We are always in crisis, whether constitutional or security, and every time Dodik takes a step further to be taken seriously,” she adds.
The FT writes that the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide will pass this week in a somber tone of statements from Western officials. “But despite their renewed focus on outsmarting Dodik, most BiH citizens fear that the crisis will be allowed to simmer,” the newspaper says.
No one will dare to confront him and stand in his way, says Džananović, a professor of political science. “As long as his family and property are safe, he will continue to deepen this crisis. If he encounters serious resistance from the authorities, he and his family will seek refuge in Hungary, and as a last resort, in Moscow. But he will probably stay. He will have no reason to leave,” she concluded.
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