Dodik works, Čović in reserve and heading towards the same goal: What is January 9th to the Washington Agreement

By Muharem CERO

Immediately and at first glance, a political detonator under his constitutional-legal structure. With his column "Dayton Referendum" today, published in Glas Srpske in Banja Luka, Milorad Dodik has removed the last doubt of the naive that this is merely a defense of the "national pride" of the Serb people in RS on January 9th.

The true political motive is the continuation of the de-constitution of Bosnian statehood by political means. The symbolism of January 9th is reduced and overlaps in its intention precisely at the point conceived in Pale in 1992. It is nothing more than a continuation of persistence towards that goal, one might say a prolonged joint criminal enterprise, and there is no longer any doubt about it.

The very staff paper for such a project is the realization of the concept of a "agreed-upon state".

Unfortunately, the whole story only begins on January 9th and has its well-established and predictable further course towards the ultimate goal of undermining and disappearing Bosnian statehood. A change in the constitutional-legal character of Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a possible victory of the agreed-upon state, would inevitably produce a domino effect on how to resolve the so-called Croatian issue in FBiH.

Dragan Čović has long not hidden his intention to re-examine the constitutional solutions in FBiH that emerged from the Washington Agreement. The January 9th endorsement of the continuity of RS would strengthen and ultimately "legalize" this intention.

One should not forget that the so-called Croatian Community of Herceg-Bosna dates its "birth" to 1991 and is slightly older than its para-state twin, the Republika Srpska.

Čović enters this Washington political dialogue with a strong argument of the equality of all peoples of BiH and interprets it through Dodik's political logic of RS as a territorial unit of the Serb people.

Precisely this political logic (undisputed by international guarantors and interpreters of Dayton) gives him the right, despite all political mimicry, to seek and expect a Croatian territorial unit in FBiH.

Cornered by this sequence of events, the so-called Bosniak policy would not have an adequate constitutional-legal response, because the triumph of Dodik's agreed-upon state would make a permanent and irreparably lobbied falsification constitutionally valid, interpreting the state character of Dayton BiH.

Factually recognized, already existing ethno-territorial units would merely be a constitutional interim step in the unstoppable dismantling of BiH statehood.

Consociational "neighborly fences" would instantly become concrete walls, and a deeply divided BiH society would become a permanently divided, dying state.

For this apocalyptic scenario not to materialize, it is necessary to thwart the "victory" of Dodik's political monster, the "Agreed-upon State". Its defeat begins with the court confirmation of the unconstitutionality of the law on RS holidays and the legal abolition of the January 9th celebration.

By dismantling the January 9th detonator, Bosnia will have the opportunity to accelerate, above all, its progress on the NATO path by urgently activating the MAP, and to put its European path into the dynamics of changing the value system of its citizens with arguments – not empty political rhetoric, but a better life for every one of its citizens.

Only in this way will Dodik and those like him become superfluous and unnecessary to those whose sacrifices they counted on until yesterday.