NATO's Rutte tells Bosnian leaders to 'take responsibility' amid crisis

By Daria Sito-Sucic

SARAJEVO (Reuters) -NATO will not let a security vacuum develop in Bosnia and Herzegovina at this time of crisis but political leaders should work together to resolve problems, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said on Monday.

Tensions have been running high since a court last month sentenced the pro-Russian president of the country's Serb Republic, Milorad Dodik, to a year in jail and banned him from politics for six years for defying the rulings of an international peace envoy.

Dodik rejected the verdict and the Serb regional parliament barred the national police and judiciary from its territory, prompting the constitutional court to temporarily suspend separatist laws it said were endangering Bosnia's constitutional order and sovereignty.

Rutte said disrespect for Bosnia's peace deal, the constitutional order and national institutions was "not acceptable".

He was referring to the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the 1992-95 war in which 100,000 people were killed. It left Bosnia divided into two regions - the Bosniak-Croat Federation and the Serb Republic, or Republika Srpska, linked via weak central institutions.

Under the peace deal, a NATO force was deployed to secure Bosnia. That was replaced in 2004 by the European Union peacekeeping mission EUFOR - but NATO remains in a supporting role and can return if peace is endangered.

The crisis in Bosnia has pitted the West against Russia, which along with Serbia and Hungary has supported Dodik. Moscow has called the Bosnian court's ruling "a strike on stability in the Balkan region".

"This is not 1992 and we will not allow any security vacuum to emerge," Rutte said after meeting Bosnia's tripartite presidency and urging its three members to "take responsibility".

"This country is looking at the three of you. Make this country proud of this presidency and solve this problem," he said.

Critics say Dodik, who has long called for the Serb Republic to break away and form a union with neighbouring Serbia, has been a destabilising force who has fuelled the kind of ethnic and political tensions that tore Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s.

Dodik maintains that Bosnia is an unviable state run by foreigners such as international High Representative Christian Schmidt, and that the Serb Republic should get back all the authorities that were taken away from it after the war, such as its own army, judiciary and tax administration.

(Reporting by Daria Sito-Sucic; Writing by Ivana Sekularac, editing by Gareth Jones and Andrew Heavens)