Little wonder diplomats and citizens on all sides fear fresh bloodshed. Last month, Dodik declared that they were starting secession moves for Republika Srpska, including setting up its own tax administration, army and security forces. This sparked fury among Serb nationalists, who still glorify some of the worst war criminals seen on European soil since the Nazi era and talk of a Greater Serbia to unite their tribe of Orthodox Christians across the region.Įven Sefik Dzaferovic, joint president of the country under its power-sharing system, called his fellow president’s actions ‘very, very dangerous’ as he admitted to me that he might need to order the nation’s armed forces to stop a Serb insurgency The trigger for this turmoil was a law passed in July to criminalise denial or glorification of genocide.Īfter years of debate, it was imposed finally by the Office of the High Representative, an international body set up to implement the peace agreement. He dismissed the genocide as ‘a staged tragedy with an aim to satanise the Serbs’ and recently branded Bosniaks ‘poor-quality’ people.Īll three of the country’s governing groups must back any reforms – and this allows Dodik to paralyse the state while hypocritically arguing that his region must leave such a dysfunctional system. When he returned to power, he started speaking of separation for his Serb-dominated entity and harshened his rhetoric. Once seen as a moderate hailed in Washington as ‘a breath of fresh air’, Dodik turned into a hardline nationalist after losing an election as prime minister of Republika Srpska, one of two administrative units established in post-war Bosnia. One analyst branded Dodik (pictured) – a nationalist puppet for Russian president Vladimir Putin’s efforts to destabilise the Continent – ‘the most dangerous man in Europe’ Thousands of Nato troops were despatched to the region now 600 EU peacekeepers remain. That deal followed three-and-a-half years of civil war, which led to Nato air attacks in 1995, followed by more strikes in Serbia and Kosovo four years later. Yet now the weakness of the West has let Russia slide into a diplomatic void to embolden extremists.Īnd these forces threaten the delicate Dayton peace accord that has held this region together for 26 years with Bosnia-Herzegovina governed on tri-partite ethnic lines between the Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats. Winston Churchill famously said that the Balkans produce more history than they can consume – and the Bosnian capital Sarajevo was, of course, the place where a local radical shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, sparking the First World War.Īs in previous centuries, rival foreign powers are struggling for influence.
So once again, the Balkans are a tinderbox on the brink of explosion – and once again, the impact could be felt far more widely than in just this tormented corner of the European continent. But now she has packed her bags, ready to flee again.įor in a chilling echo of the blood-drenched past, Milorad Dodik, the leader of Bosnia’s Serbs, is pushing for a breakaway republic and even planning to revive the army responsible for that genocide.įor in a chilling echo of the blood-drenched past, Milorad Dodik, the leader of Bosnia’s Serbs, is pushing for a breakaway republic and even planning to revive the army responsible for that genocide One woman, who never found the bodies of her three sons, had returned to live peacefully in the place where she had given birth to those children and where she hoped to end her years. It was in that capacity that, a few days ago, she went to meet some other bereaved mothers of Srebrenica – and they greeted her with tears running down their faces. Munira turned her agony into leading a campaign by women to find the remains of their menfolk. She was also, like thousands more women, assaulted by rampaging Serb forces who hunted down men to murder and women to rape in Bosnia’s woods and destroyed villages after the post-Communist implosion of Yugoslavia. Munira Subasic lost her husband and teenage son in the darkest chapter of European history since the Second World War – the 1995 genocide of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, when more than 8,300 people were massacred in a few days of horror.
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