Influential US Senator Chuck Grassley addressed the Senate on Monday, where he spoke about the political situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the separatism of the President of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik.
Earlier on the social network X, Grassley also criticized Croatian politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina, stating that, as he said, Bosnian Croats had also begun to support separatism. He pointed out that such attempts did not benefit the separatists in the 1990s, and they will not benefit them now either.
Grassley reminded his colleagues in the Senate of the genocide that occurred in 1995, as well as the Dayton Peace Agreement. He stressed that Milorad Dodik has been threatening to secede from that part of Bosnia and Herzegovina for years and warned of the dangers of such policies.
“Remember, we already had a war in the 1990s because of people like Dodik who tried the same thing. His predecessors were sentenced to life in prison for war crimes and genocide,” Grassley said, clearly drawing a parallel between Dodik and the convicted war criminal and first president of RS, Radovan Karadžić.
The US senator highlighted the significant Bosniak community in the state of Iowa, which, he said, has enriched American society. He added that many Bosnians in the US have families in their homeland and that he has spoken to them about the current situation.
Grassley recalled that the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina convicted Dodik of attacking state institutions, after which the National Assembly of Republika Srpska passed decisions prohibiting the work of state agencies and the judiciary on the territory of that entity. The senator stressed that such developments “extremely concern him”.
“The United States and Secretary Marco Rubio are aware of these developments. The Trump administration has made the stability of the Western Balkans a priority, and we are closely monitoring who in the region supports stability and who supports separatism and violence,” Grassley said.
He also recalled the fate of those who supported separatism and war crimes in the 1990s, saying that “it did not end well” for them.
He concluded that he would work with the Trump administration “to pressure Dodik and his allies to abandon their policies and respect the Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the war in 1995.”
