Dodik: Republika Srpska Only Wants the Dayton BiH
Two weeks before Bosnia's general elections, SNSD leader Milorad Dodik repeated that Republika Srpska cares only about the BiH set up by the Dayton Agreement, with a fresh message for Bosniaks.
Milorad Dodik, president of the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD), today, September 21, repeated a message he has been sending from Republika Srpska for months: that Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole does not interest them, and that they recognize only the state established by the Dayton Peace Agreement. The message lands two weeks before Bosnia’s general elections, scheduled for October, and just ahead of elections in Republika Srpska itself, at a moment when Belgrade is watching every signal from Banja Luka closely, since the outcome of these votes will shape how the two entities’ relations with Serbia develop from here.
Dodik posted the message on X.
We are not interested in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Perhaps we will keep our attention only on the BiH established by the Dayton Peace Agreement.
He added a message aimed at Bosniaks.
Bosniaks will not like this, although I do not understand how they fail to grasp that it is better for them too to govern the territory they actually hold. It is better to have everything on one part than nothing across the whole of BiH.
According to the Srpskainfo agency, the post went up at 11:19 a.m. It should be noted that the sources do not record the same moment for when this line was first spoken: Tanjug had already carried the identical formulation about the Dayton Agreement on September 20 at 9:40 a.m., as part of an interview Dodik gave the newspaper Politika the day before. The two sources, in other words, place the same thought in two different settings and on two different dates, first in a written interview, then in a post on social media.
In the interview with Politika, Dodik also said the election campaign in Republika Srpska was running without incident.
The campaign itself, however, is unfolding quite decently, as in all democratic and healthy societies.
He said he was not asking Sarajevo’s institutions for anything beyond the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but that he insisted on everything the document provides for.
We live a constitutional life and we are not asking for anything outside the Constitution, but we are asking for everything written in it, and I mean literally everything.
A day earlier, in Gradiska, Dodik went a step further and called for all Serb political representatives who win mandates at the Bosnia and Herzegovina level in the coming elections to present a united front.
That all political representatives who win mandates unite and act together. That they not drift off on their own, that they not become an appendage to the ones in Sarajevo, and that we call off their whole plan to build up Bosnia. Bosnia does not interest us.
The call for a united Serb political front at the Bosnia and Herzegovina level is not new, but it carries more weight ahead of these elections: a fragmented showing by Serb representatives in the joint institutions, by Dodik’s logic, weakens Republika Srpska’s negotiating position, and it comes just as Bosnians vote, for the first time in several years, without a high representative present in Sarajevo.
Dodik also grounded his aversion to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s central institutions in historical experience, arguing that Sarajevo has systematically shown hostility toward Republika Srpska.
Historically, whenever they had the chance in Sarajevo, they showed hostility toward us. In the nineties they drove the Serbs out of Sarajevo, for thirty years now they have been saying we are the bad guys, and they do not understand that there is not a single person in Republika Srpska who does not look with disgust at that hypocritical charade about the supposed beauty of coexistence, in which they are trying to become the majority.
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s general elections are set for October, and their outcome will determine whether this kind of rhetoric stays confined to campaign season or signals a more lasting shift in how Banja Luka deals with the joint institutions in Sarajevo. Until then, every new statement Milorad Dodik makes on the subject, whether in an interview with Serbian media or on social media, is read in Belgrade as a sign of how ready Republika Srpska is for compromise with Bosnia’s new government, and how ready it is for further separation.
