Laws passed by an autonomous republic deny federal police and judicial powers.
The Bosnian Constitutional Court has suspended the law passed by the Srpska region of the autonomous republic.
The court said Friday that Bosnian Serbian President Milorado Dodik had “temporarily suspended” the law that pushed the regional parliament earlier this week.
The law took office for six years after a Sarajevo court sentenced Dodik to a year in prison and refused to comply with the decision of Christian Schmidt, the international representative who oversaw the Bosnian peace agreement.
Since the end of the Bosnian inter-ethnic conflict in the 1990s, the country has consisted of two autonomous regions. The Republic’s Srpska and the Kroto Federation of Muslims linked by weak central governments.
Bosnian officials say Dodik’s law violated the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the 1992-95 war, detaining two groups, the joint institutions, including the Army, the Supreme Court and tax authorities.
Dodik on Thursday said he ignored a subpoena from a Bosnian prosecutor to investigate him, allegedly undermining the country’s constitutional order.
On Friday, he doubled the separatist drive and called on ethnic Serbs to quit federal police and courts and join the Republican SRPSKA government.
“We have secured jobs for them while maintaining their legal status, rank and position. They get the same salary, or higher salary than they had,” Dodik said.
Dodik later added that he had no plans for violent escalation, but insisted that Republika Srpska “has the ability to protect ourselves, and we will do that.”
On Friday, local media reported that police from the Republic of Serbia in Bosnia had driven federal agents out of the state Information Protection Agency (SIPA) from the property in Banja Luka.
However, the head of Sipa, Darko Culum, later mislabeled the report, claiming that the security situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina was “stable and calm.”
The situation at Republika Srpska remained tense on Friday.
The Slebrenica Memorial Centre, where most of the 8,000 casualties killed by the Serbian ethnic forces in July 1995 are buried, said it had closed the door “until further notice” citing the uncertainty caused by the ongoing political crisis.
“The decision was made because of the inability to ensure appropriate security assurances for employees, collaborators, guests and visitors,” the centre in the village of Potokari said in an online statement.
Source link
