SARAJEVO, April 5 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Bosnian-Serb police expelled a German junior minister from their territory after she met with opposition groups amid tension over Serb efforts to break away from the central authorities.
German Secretary of State for European Affairs Anna Luehrmann said representatives of the Bosnian Serb statelet’s leader, Milorad Dodik, threatened her with “violence” in the entity’s capital city, Banja Luka.
The Bosnian-Serb authorities declared Luehrmann “persona non grata” as part of what it said were “reciprocal measures” following sanctions by Berlin.
“I expect the police to escort her out of Republika Srpska very quickly and for good,” Dodik wrote on social media.
Germany and Austria on Thursday banned from their territory Dodik and two other senior figures from Republika Srpska (RS), the ethnic Serb half of Bosnia.
They cited Dodik’s recent series of moves challenging the central Bosnian institutions, which they said undermined the Balkan state’s constitution.
Bosnian national television reported that Luehrmann had to cancel her last meetings on Friday and left Banja Luka under police escort.
She said in a video on social media that Dodik had “demonstrated again his destructive behaviour. His representatives threatened me and my delegation with violence”.
Since the end of an interethnic war in the 1990s, Bosnia has been split into semi-autonomous halves: the Serbs’ Republika Srpska and a Muslim-Croat federation.
Each has its own government and parliament, with only weak central institutions binding the country of 3.5 million people together.
Dodik has for years led a campaign chipping away at Bosnia’s weak central institutions, threatening to make the Serb entity secede.
In recent months he barred central police and judicial officials from working there — an order that was suspended by Bosnia’s constitutional court. — NNN-AGENCIES
