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New political crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bosnia and Herzegovina, which still has no government, three and a half months after the elections of 7 October, is again plunged into a deep political crisis. What was the pretext for this new pressure surge? Lighting of our correspondent in the region.
On Wednesday, 23 January, the SDA, the Bosnian nationalist party, announced that it intended to appeal to the Constitutional Court against the name of Republika Srpska, the " Serbian entity " of a still-divided Bosnia-Herzegovina, believing that this name was discriminatory for Bosnians, Croats and all non-Serb citizens living on the territory of this entity.
He provoked the immediate anger of Milorad Dodik, the Serbian member of the country's tripartite presidency. On Thursday, all the Serbian parties in the country adopted a joint resolution, threatening to leave the fragile institutions of the country. Milorad Dodik himself announced that he was considering " suspending " his participation in the collegiate presidency.
The SDA and the Serbian parties are familiar with such provocations ...
Since the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in December 1995, Bosnia has been a theoretically united country but divided into two entities, the Republika Srpska and the Bosnian-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but above all, where all power has been left to nationalist oligarchies who have every interest in regularly provoking this kind of crisis. While Bosnia does not come out of the economic slump and is hit by a continuous exodus of its citizens that has accelerated sharply in recent years, these parties have only the card of nationalism to play to justify their retention in power .
Three and a half months after the last elections , the Bosnian, Croat and Serb nationalists are in the midst of negotiations to try to form a new government, but they are stumbling on the issue of the rapprochement of the country with NATO, opposed by Serbs. The whole blocked political system of Bosnia rests on a tacit alliance between the nationalists who need to provoke new crises to mobilize, each one, their own public opinion. The SDA initiative is certainly intended to raise the stakes, and many local analysts are bitterly of the opinion that Serbian leader Dodik must have opened the champagne after this new Bosnian provocation.
This new crisis comes in a particularly tense regional context ...
There is still much talk of a "final agreement" between Kosovo and Serbia, which would involve an exchange of territories between the two countries. This could be a formidable precedent for the Bosnian Serbs to claim the secession of their entity and its attachment to Serbia. For their part, Croatian nationalists still demand the creation of a third entity to separate Bosniacs. Ten days ago, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for a " revision " of the Dayton Accords while receiving Croatian President Kolinda Grabar ten days ago. Kitarovic. For his part, Milorad Dodik met Russian President Vladimir Putin, who visited Belgrade last week and also enjoys new support from the US administration. Steve Bannon, the American inspirer of extreme European rights, even supported him during the last election campaign. The nationalists of the three communities of Bosnia and Herzegovina excel in the art of firefighting firefighters, but playing with fire all the time means that there is a risk of fires that no one can extinguish.
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