SARAJEVO: Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, who is wanted on secession charges, is expected again in East Sarajevo on Thursday, hours after federal police attempted to arrest him but turned back for fear of a conflict.
Dodik, the president of the Bosnian Serb statelet, is wanted by Bosnia’s central judiciary after a series of secessionist moves, but continues to defy an arrest warrant issued in mid-March.
Since the end of its bloody inter-ethnic war in the 1990s, Bosnia remains split into two highly autonomous halves — the Serbs’ Republika Srpska (RS) and a Muslim-Croat Federation, linked by a weak central government.
On Wednesday, federal police officers tried to enter an official building in East Sarajevo, a Serb-controlled town near the Bosnian capital, to arrest Dodik but were blocked by Bosnian Serb interior ministry forces.
“Our colleagues from the RS ministry simply weren’t cooperative, or rather, they believed that it shouldn’t be carried out, that it could perhaps lead to some conflict,“ said Jelena Miovcic, spokeswoman for the federal police force (SIPA).
“We simply assessed that proceeding might cause bigger problems… In the end, we didn’t go in armed… It was meant to be handled in a civilised way, to explain things clearly — that we are legally obliged to enforce the court order from Bosnia and Herzegovina,“ she told AFP.
Dodik accused the federal police at an improvised press conference Wednesday night of “violating RS laws”, referring to RS parliament legislation banning the federal police and judiciary from the statelet.
Dodik, 66, has repeatedly refused to follow rulings from the international high representative who oversees the Bosnian peace deal.
The court of Bosnia and Herzegovina convicted him in February, sentencing him to one year in prison and banning him from holding public office for six years.
Dodik rejected the ruling and, in response, barred the federal police and judiciary from operating in Republika Srpska.
