By Daria Sito-Sucic
SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Germany and Austria said on Thursday they would bar Bosnian Serb separatist leader Milorad Dodik and his two closest aides from their territories, accusing him of threatening the security of his fragile country and the region.
Dodik, the president of Bosnia’s autonomous Serb Republic, has triggered a constitutional crisis by defying rulings by the international envoy whose role is to prevent the multi-ethnic Balkan state from slipping back into conflict.
That has escalated into a legal and political standoff pitting Dodik and his allies Russia and Serbia against the U.S. and the EU, and seen as one of the biggest threats to peace in the Balkans since the 1990s conflicts.
Austria’s Foreign Minister, Beate Meinl Reisinger, said on Thursday that Dodik has taken secessionist provocations and actions to a new extreme and crossed legal red lines.
“We no longer want to accept such behaviour,” she said during a visit to Bosnia’s capital Sarajevo with Germany’s Minister of State for Europe and Climate, Anna Luhrmann.
The ministers issued a joint statement saying moves by the Bosnian Serb leadership were blocking Bosnia’s EU accession process and putting its future in the EU at risk.
Dodik was not immediately available for comment. He has dismissed other actions against him as politically motivated.
Dodik was sentenced in February to a year in jail and banned from politics for six years over ignoring the envoy’s rulings. In response, Dodik had initiated laws barring state judiciary and police from the region, prompting the court to issue an arrest warrant for him and his allies.
The Serb Republic and the Bosniak-Croat Federation are two regions created after the 1990s war in which 100,000 died. They are linked by a weak central government in a state supervised by an international authority to stop it slipping back into conflict.
(Reporting by Daria Sito-Sucic and Alexander Ratz; Editing by Alexandra Hudson and Andrew Heavens)
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