The SNSD President, Milorad Dodik, once again made an announcement in which he harshly attacked Bosnia and Herzegovina’s sovereignty, attempting to justify the direct interference of neighboring countries in our country’s internal affairs.
In his recent media appearance, Dodik continued his old practice of wrongly interpreting the Dayton Peace Agreement, claiming that Croatia and Serbia have “identical rights just like the state levels of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” completely disregarding the fact that these two countries are signatories to the Dayton Agreement primarily as participants in the armed conflict, not as “owners” or sovereigns over Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“The rights and obligations of Croatia are clear and identical to the rights of Serbia and the state level of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Those are the facts Sarajevo is trying to erase,” Dodik said, adding that Croatia “has a full right to open all key political questions,” and that this is not “interference but a Dayton obligation.”
Instead of political argumentation, the SNSD President quickly moved into the territory of dangerous religious radicalism. In the style of the rightist ideologies from the darkest period in the 90s, Dodik divided citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina strictly according to religious lines, trying to present Bosniaks as an “Islamic threat” to Christianity.
“It is completely natural for Croatia to stand with its Christian Catholic Croatian people, just like Serbia is standing with its Christian Orthodox Serbian people. Because Christian values in Bosnia and Herzegovina are defended from hysterical attempts at outvoting carried out by Bosniak Muslims,” Dodik said.
This narrative is not accidental in the slightest. With this, the president of the Republika Srpska entity is desperately trying to legitimize the political goals of Beograd and Zagreb in Bosnia and Herzegovina, presenting them as a unique “pillar of Christianity” against Bosniaks, who are being perfidiously stripped of their national identity and reduced exclusively to a religious group.
This time, Dodik took on the role of a megaphone for the HDZ’s policy, reiterating mantras about “authentic representation of Croats” while accusing political representatives from Sarajevo of arrogance.
“The attempts by the political elite from Sarajevo to present this as a blow to sovereignty are ridiculous. Bosnia and Herzegovina was never theirs, nor will it ever be,” the SNSD leader arrogantly claimed.
In the end, Dodik did not miss out on a chance to once again threaten to undermine the country, stating that the protection of Christian rights from “Muslim centralization” is the only way for Bosnia and Herzegovina to survive, and that any other scenario leads ‘towards the end of this kind of Bosnia and Herzegovina.”, Klix.ba writes.
