No, he doesn't believe in a new war, says Srdjan Blagovčanin.

The head of the Bosnian branch of Transparency International welcomes you to a bare office in the Habsburg-influenced part of the old town of Sarajevo, not far from a historic site: a few meters away is the market square.

More than a hundred people were killed on it in 1994 and 1995 during the Serbian siege of the Bosnian capital in two mortar impacts.

For a few weeks now, there has been fear in Sarajevo that events like those of then could repeat themselves, that the bloodshed would return to Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Michael Martens

Correspondent for Southeast European countries based in Vienna.

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Anyone who asks about the reason for this fear will always hear a name: Milorad Dodik. That is the name of the most powerful and presumably richest politician of the Bosnian Serbs. After the formally Muslim Bosniaks and before the Croats, they form the second largest population group in the Balkan state.

Dodik has held many offices in the course of his long career, and there is hardly a top politician in Europe who has been in business for as long as he is. From 1998 to 2001 and then again from 2006 to 2010 he was head of government in the "Republika Srpska" or RS for short, as the Serb-controlled half of Bosnia is called in their language. After that, Dodik was President of the RS for eight years until 2018. He is still president, but now of the entire state of Bosnia-Hercegovina - even if only one of several, because in Bosnia the highest office of state, like many other things, is threefold: one head of state should be Serb, the other the Bosniak and another the Croatian Represent population group.

Dodik differs from the other two Bosnian presidents, however, in that he would prefer to abolish the state he is at the head of. Bosnia is not a state, but just a territory. "They are trying to force us to believe that it is a state," he once said. He has made many similar statements. The core message is always: The capital of the Bosnian Serbs is Belgrade, not Sarajevo and Bosnia a people dungeon from which you should flee at the first opportunity.

For some time now, Dodik has been intensifying a policy in this sense that frightens many people in Sarajevo.

The RS parliament recently decided that within six months the Serb republic should draft laws that would de facto separate the Serb-dominated part of the country from the rest of the state.

It's about building a separate army, a separate tax system and a separate judiciary.

If he got away with it, nothing more than a shell would remain of the already weak state as a whole.

Policy of consensual hostility

In reality, however, Dodik is concerned with something else, speculates Blagovčanin.

He recalled that in the past 15 years the politician had announced 30 referendums, which in one form or another always aimed to undermine the state as a whole, but which in almost all cases came to nothing.

Dodik's actual motivation is different, says the anti-corruption campaigner: “In order to maintain the status quo and stay in power, nationalist politicians like Dodik have to increase tensions from time to time.

Our politicians have been using this strategy for years.

Not only Dodik is a master at it. ”The leadership of the country wanted to divert attention from domestic political failure and corruption.