NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has spoken harshly against the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Taking the lead from the sentencing of the leader of Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, and the protests that accompanied that decision, Rutte made it clear that we are no longer in 1992 and that Bosnia's sovereignty is one and indivisible.
"NATO fully supports the territorial integrity of Bosnia and political leaders must resolve the tensions that have been fueled by a prison sentence imposed on the president of the Bosnian Serb region," the alliance's Secretary General Mark Rutte said on Monday.
"We will not allow the hard-won peace to be jeopardized. You as a tripartite alliance must take responsibility. This country is looking to the three of you. Make this country proud with this presidency and solve this problem," he added.
Tensions have been rising in Bosnia since a court last month sentenced the pro-Russian president of the Serb region, Milorad Dodik, to a year in prison and banned him from politics for six years. He rejected the verdict, and the Serbian regional parliament banned the national police and judiciary from its territory. The decision prompted the European Union peacekeeping mission, EUFOR, to announce a temporary increase in the size of its 1,100-strong force in the country.
Rutte said that NATO would not allow a security vacuum to be created and that disrespect for the peace agreement and Bosnia's constitution was "unacceptable".
He was referring to the Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the 1992-95 war, in which 100,000 people were killed. It left Bosnia divided into two regions - the Bosniak-Croat Federation and the Serb republic, or Republika Srpska, with weak central institutions.
Critics say Dodik, who has long called for Republika Srpska to secede and form a union with neighboring Serbia, has been a destabilizing force that has fueled the kind of ethnic and political tensions that tore apart Yugoslavia in the 1990s. (A2 Televizion)
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