Bosnia and Herzegovina is once again in the throes of political crisis, and once again the chief architect is Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of the country’s tripartite presidency.
The causes of the current tumult are familiar: Dodik and his hardline nationalist Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, SNSD, were displeased with a ruling by Bosnia’s Constitutional Court. As a result, they demanded the ouster of the court’s three international judges.
This demand, however, was quickly followed by an ultimatum: until a new law was passed to allow for the ouster of these judges, the SNSD would mount a de facto blockade of the state parliament, refusing to attend any of the legislature’s sessions and thus denying the body a quorum.
Moreover, as Dodik made clear in a series of media appearances and a subsequent speech to the entity assembly of the Republika Srpska, RS, even if all his demands were met, the entity was still heading definitively towards secession. Or as he put it, in rather tortured English: “goodbye BiH, welcome RSexit”.
There have been a number of twists and turns since, including US threats of a new round of sanctions against the SNSD leadership and Dodik’s vetoing of a visit to Bosnia by the President of Montenegro, Milo Djukanovic.