Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a country; it’s a ceasefire between three nations pretending to be one, and it may soon come to an end.
The country’s highest court on Wednesday found Republika Srpska leader Milorad Dodik, the president of the country’s Serb-dominated state, guilty of defying the authority of Bosnia’s UN High Representative, Christian Schmidt, sentencing him to one year in prison while also banning him from holding public office for six years.
Dodik, who previously said he would reject the court’s ruling “whatever it may be,” appeared on Wednesday to address his supporters in front of the National Assembly in Banja Luka, the capital of Republika Srpska. “They say I am guilty but there is no reason to worry,” the president said. “I have learned to deal with tougher situations. What matters is that you are here.”
Although he could appeal the ruling, Dodik said he won’t challenge something that’s not legitimate in the first place. The sovereigntist social democrat has been defying the UN peace envoy’s oversight of domestic issues for years, which only increased his popularity among the voters, so there’s little chance that he would abandon his office willingly.
The current dispute began in 2023 when the Bosniak-Croat majority in the Constitutional Court decided to change the rules and allow for sessions and decisions without the presence of their Serb counterparts.
The Srpska parliament retaliated by voting to suspend the court’s rulings and stop publishing the peace envoy’s decrees in the region’s official gazette—both of which are specified by the Dayton Agreement, which ended the first Yugoslav war in 1995. The federal government in Sarajevo then replied by criminalizing non-compliance, which eventually led to Wednesday’s court ruling.
Instead of backing down, however, Dodik escalated by banning federal law enforcement, security agencies, and judicial bodies from operating in Republika Srpska. The parliament will also vote on a resolution to officially reject the verdict as well as the authority of the Sarajevo Supreme Court.
“As of today, the Bosnia and Herzegovina you knew no longer exists,” Dodik stated, fueling fears of a renewed separatist push and ethnic conflict, thirty years after the war ended.
Quick Dayton explainer
The Dayton Agreement ended four years of bloodshed in the Balkan country by splitting Bosnia into two regions: the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska in the north and the east, and the Bosniak-Croat Federation—modeled after the Swiss canton system—in the southwest.
The two parts are linked by a weak central government led by a council of three presidents—one for each national community—which is overseen by the High Representative, or peace envoy, appointed by the Steering Board of the Peace Implementation Council (PIC), made up of nine countries, the European Commission, and the EU Council’s Presidency.
According to the treaty, the High Representative has the authority to impose and revoke laws to uphold the Dayton agreement and prevent the hostilities from re-emerging, as well as to sack obstructing officials. Traditionally, the envoy comes from a European country, while his deputy is always American.
The institution effectively in charge of the country will remain in place until certain conditions specified by the Dayton Agreement are met, one of which is “a positive assessment of the situation” by the PIC, meaning that Bosnia will become independent of Western supervision when the West says so.
And that’s the root cause of the dispute. “There can be no sovereignty if you’re a colony,” Dodik said back in 2023, adding that if the fragile peace ever breaks down, the responsibility should not be sought in Banja Luka, but in Western embassies in Sarajevo.
What’s next?
It’s difficult to predict if Republika Srpska would actually embark on the path to independence, but Bosnia and Herzegovina has never been this close to breaking up since its conception in Dayton, Ohio.
Dodik himself has been threatening with referendums on its status for years, but he also stressed that his intention was always to solve the persisting issues peacefully. “We do not want a conflict, and we see NATO’s role to ensure peace and, possibly, to secure an inter-entity demarcation line in the event of a politically heated situation,” the president said. “Republika Srpska has no intention of changing its position.”
There’s also the problem of neighboring Serbia, which has always been protective of the interests of Republika Srpska and frequently condemned the Croat-Bosniak majority’s alleged rule-of-law abuses against the Serb state. After Wednesday’s court ruling, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić convened an emergency meeting of the National Security Council, no doubt to prepare for any possible escalation that could jeopardize the region’s stability.
Addressing his nation after traveling to Banja Luka to meet with Dodik, Vučić said the verdict was not just an attack on his key ally, but also on Serbian people as a whole. At the same time, he stressed that a peaceful resolution was more important than ever, and asked Dodik to invite not only his Bosniak and Croat counterparts to talks, but also representatives of the EU, U.S., Russia, and China,
to show the Serbian definition of peace and solving problems through dialogue, not threats and blackmail.
Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán also weighed in on the situation, calling the verdict a “political witch hunt” that’s a “sad example” of the weaponization of the judiciary against a democratically elected leader. “If we want to safeguard stability in the Western Balkans, this is not the way forward!” Orbán wrote on X.
