JAKARTA – Serbian leader Bosnia Milorad Dodik promised to oppose a court ruling banning him from holding political office for six years. Dodik will seek help from Russia and US President Donald Trump.
Milorad Dodik responded to the Bosnian appeals court’s ruling which upheld the sentence handed down to him for opposing an international peace envoy who was tasked with preventing multiethnic Bosnia from falling into civil war again.
Dodik told reporters he would continue to work.
“I did not accept the verdict,” he said.
“I will ask the Russian government for help and write a letter to the US government,” he continued.
He said he would ask his colleagues not to communicate with ambassadors from the European Union, which have peacekeeping forces in Bosnia and deploy reserve troops during the crisis.
The sentence handed down to Dodik in February for opposing the Constitutional Court and the peace envoy, includes a one-year prison sentence that, based on Bosnian legal systems, could possibly be exchanged for fines.
His lawyer, Goran Bubic, said his team would appeal the appeal court’s decision on Friday to the Constitutional Court and requested a temporary postponement of the implementation of the ruling pending its decision.
Dodik’s February ruling sparked an uproar in Bosnia’s autonomous Republic of Serbia, sparking Bosnia’s worst political crisis since the conflict, which killed some 100,000 people in 1992-1995.
As a pro-Russian nationalist who wants to separate his territory from Bosnia, Dodik responds with steps to reduce the country’s existence in the Serbian Republic by ordering lawmakers to ban prosecutors, courts, and intelligence agencies from the country.
The Constitutional Court then temporarily suspended the regional parliamentary law for endangering the constitutional and legal order as well as Bosnian and Herzegovina’s sovereignty, the country’s official name.
Dodik has long fought for the segregation of Serbian-dominated territory, which together with the Bosnian-Croatian Federation formed Bosnia.
The crisis sparked by the separatist push is one of the biggest threats to peace in the Balkans since the conflict-conflicts that followed the collapse oftenu.
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