Did Vučić send a message to Dodik and the RS via Dačić that their time is running out?

Written by: Delvin Kovač

If you ask Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dačić, he will probably tell you that the entire Bosnian public misunderstood him. Dačić will try to exonerate his statement from yesterday and explain that he actually meant something else. But in essence, he spoke the plain truth - the entity of Republika Srpska is indeed an international creation invented by the United States of America.

Dačić only failed to add that this Bosnian entity was also created through Serbian UZP and genocide, which was confirmed in The Hague by the verdict in the case of Jovica Stanišić and Franko Simatović, as well as in the genocide verdicts. Dačić should also have reminded that the RS was created in 1995 with the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement. This would have further cemented Dodik's absurdities about the existence of the RS before Dayton, and thus trampled on the justification for celebrating RS Day on January 9.

It is justified to ask whether Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, through his foreign minister, floated a trial balloon to see how the public in the RS would react to such statements, and if there is no strong reaction, perhaps try something more. Because Vučić has certainly heard media reports, albeit unverified, that an impatient West is preparing to remove Dodik and ban him from political activity, so perhaps he wants to distance himself from him in time. And he is well aware that Dodik could become a burden around his neck due to the enormous and hopeless financial quagmire awaiting the RS in the coming months because of massive borrowing.

We often have the opportunity to hear Dodik talk about a protectorate. And he would be completely right if he did not bring Bosnia and Herzegovina into that context, but rather the entity he leads. The only protectorate here is the RS entity, because it is still protected from definitive abolition by the international community, that is, the same United States of America that created it, which Dačić himself was aware of in his speech yesterday.

The RS, as a product of the political kitchen of Richard Holbrooke and Slobodan Milošević, is an experiment of the international community that was known in advance could not last long. And if we take into account the latest decisions of the RSNA, behind which Dodik alone stands head and shoulders, the Dayton Agreement has been seriously undermined and its continued existence called into question. And if there is no Dayton Agreement, the only thing that exists is the Constitution of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which the RS does not appear on the map.

Dayton has been threatened in the RSNA countless times so far. The entity parliament has repeatedly passed laws that derogate the jurisdiction of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. There have been many drops that have made the cup overflow, especially those related to state property, non-application of the High Representative's decisions, and non-application of the decisions of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the territory of the RS. Dodik may be the winner of the elections for the President of the RS, although even that is questionable, but he definitely cannot hide behind the electoral will of the people and violate all possible laws for years without any responsibility.

He would have to answer, and of course, the Prosecutor's Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina must take care of that, in which, as the president of the Association of Victims and Witnesses of Genocide Murat Tahirović recently confirmed to us, as many as 50% of prosecutors are Bosniaks!

Therefore, all Bosnians and Herzegovinians rightly wonder why Dodik has not been prosecuted yet. And even if High Representative Christian Schmidt gets the green light from the West and removes the leader of the SNSD and the RS and ousts him from politics, Dodik will have to answer someday.

Justice may be slow, but it is still attainable.