Putin friend marches on
Bosnian Serbs provoke with a parade
1/9/2023 7:51 p.m
A Bosnian court classifies the march as unconstitutional – but thousands are still armed. The shady son of the Serbian President has his first official appearance.
The leadership of the Serbian part of Bosnia showed strength with a paramilitary parade on the outskirts of Sarajevo. 2000 paramilitaries, police officers and civil servants of the Serb Republic (RS) marched in East Sarajevo in front of RS President Milorad Dodik and his guests.
The parade was part of the celebrations of the so-called RS Day. Several thousand Serbs lined the way and waved the flags of the RS and neighboring Serbia. The Bosnian constitutional court declared the annual march on January 9 to be unconstitutional. This year it was held for the first time in East Sarajevo, a small area on the eastern edge of the Bosnian capital that belongs to the RS.
On January 9, 1992, the convicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic founded the Bosnian Serb Republic with the support of the rest of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro). In the war that followed (1992-1995), the Yugoslav and Bosnian Serb military committed genocide, massacres and expelled Bosniak and Croat populations.
Putin friend Dodik promotes secession from Bosnia
For several years, Dodik has been promoting the RS’s split from Bosnia, which consists of the Serb Republic and the Bosnian-Croatian Federation (FBiH). For the Bosniak majority population in Sarajevo, the march represented a provocation. During the Bosnian War, the city had been besieged from the surrounding mountains and from today’s East Sarajevo for more than three years. The parade took place less than 500 meters from the border between the two parts of the country.
Milorad Dodik (in a suit) wants to present Vladimir Putin with a medal at the next meeting.
(Photo: picture alliance/dpa/AP)
In his speech, Dodik stylized the RS as a “republic of peace and freedom”. Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic sat next to Dodik in the grandstand. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic sent his son Danilo to the celebration in east Sarajevo. It was the first official appearance of the Serbian presidential offspring. So far, Danilo Vucic has attracted attention primarily through photos in the media that show him in the company of figures from the underworld.
The day before, in the RS capital of Banja Luka, Dodik had presented the Order of the RS to Russian President Vladimir Putin in absentia. Dodik said he would hand it over personally later.
Dodik is repeatedly received by Putin, which has not changed since the beginning of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. The US embassy in Sarajevo condemned the march and Dodik’s secession policy. “The Republic of Serbia will only destroy itself and those around it by chasing the will-o’-the-wisp of independence,” it said in a statement on the Twitter account the embassy.