Serb part of Bosnia to bar state authorities after indictment of its leader

By Daria Sito-Sucic

SARAJEVO (Reuters) - Bosnia's Serb Republic is expected to bar the state police and judiciary from operating on its territory on Thursday, a day after a state court ordered the Russian-backed separatist Serb president to step down for defying an international peace envoy.

Russia said the six-year political ban and one-year jail term handed down to Bosnian Serb President Milorad Dodik was politically-motivated and would destabilise the Balkans, a region in southeastern Europe riven by conflict in the 1990s.

Dodik rejected the sentence, imposed over his signing of laws suspending rulings by Bosnia's constitutional court and international peace envoy Christian Schmidt. He has two weeks to appeal and Bosnian law allows people to pay a fine instead if the term is no more than a year.

The Bosnian Serb leader, who heads one of two regions created to end the 1992-5 war that killed more than 100,000 people in multi-ethnic Bosnia, responded to his sentencing by ordering the bans on the state police and judiciary. Parliament is set to approve them in a session that starts at 1400 GMT.

The move will further weaken an already fragile state which has been supervised by an international authority since 1995 to stop it slipping back into war.

In Moscow, the Kremlin blamed the internationally-backed Bosnian state authorities for the crisis, saying Russian President Vladimir Putin had met Dodik many times and had a constructive working relationship with him.

"These are actions that will and could lead to the destabilisation of the situation, which is very bad," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, arguing that the indictment was aimed at "all patriotic Serbian forces".

The U.S.-backed 1995 Dayton peace accords split Bosnia, site of the worst of the conflicts that broke out as Socialist Yugoslavia fell apart, into a Serb Republic and a Federation shared by Croats and Bosniaks. They are linked via a weak central government.

Dodik, who wants to unite the Serb Republic with neighbouring Serbia, maintains that Bosnia's state police and judiciary were not envisaged in the constitution but created based on rulings by international envoys he regards as illegitimate.

The U.S. State Department criticised Dodik's move.

"We firmly oppose any actions by local leaders that would undermine security and stability. We support Dayton and Bosnia and Herzegovina’s sovereignty and territorial integrity," spokesperson Tammy Bruse posted on X platform on Thursday. 

The European Union urged all political actors to "refrain from and renounce provocative divisive rhetoric and actions, including questioning the constitutional order, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of the country".

In 2021, Dodik tried to withdraw the Serb region from the joint army, judiciary and tax administration but delayed the action due to the war in Ukraine. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban joined Russia in condemning Wednesday's verdict.

(Additional reporting by Edward McAllister in Athens and Dmitry Antonov in Moscow; Editing by Philippa Fletcher)