The parliament of Bosnia’s autonomous Republika Srpska approved a controversial government reshuffle late on Tuesday, a move the opposition condemned as illegal because it was initiated by Milorad Dodik, the region’s president, who has been banned from politics.
The reshuffle was initiated by Dodik, who last month was stripped of his mandate as president by Bosnia’s central election commission. An appeals court had previously upheld a one-year jail sentence and a six-year ban from politics against Dodik for defying rulings by the international envoy tasked with overseeing implementation of the Dayton peace accords, which ended a conflict that killed around 100,000 people.
Despite the ban, Dodik, who has long pushed for Republika Srpska’s secession from Bosnia with backing from Russia, has refused to step down. The election commission has scheduled a November 23 vote to elect his successor.
Arguing that changes were necessary to face “challenges ahead,” Dodik asked regional Prime Minister Radovan Višković to resign and nominated former agriculture minister Savo Minić to take his place. The reshuffled government, with four new members, was approved by 50 deputies from the ruling coalition led by Dodik’s SNSD party. Opposition deputies boycotted the session, saying the government was illegitimate because Dodik no longer held a valid mandate.
In his new role, Prime Minister Savo Minić pledged that the new government would seek to restore Bosnia to “post-war basics,” aligning with Dodik’s insistence that only institutions from the so-called “original Dayton deal” were acceptable to Bosnian Serbs. He further announced a referendum on Dodik’s status and declared that the Serb Republic held “the right to self-determination.”
