A top Bosnian state official has denied that the country’s autonomous Serb region forced the national police out of their premises on Friday, amid growing tension between the province and central authorities.
Media reports suggested that the Serb-majority Republika Srpska’s regional police force had told the State Information and Protection Agency (SIPA) to leave its building in Banja Luka, the region’s largest city.
But the head of SIPA, Darko Culum, played down the reports of a hasty exit, saying that a request by the provincial authorities for the national police to vacate was “nothing, just an ordinary request, a letter.”
He added that operations were running as usual, the Reuters news agency reported.
The region has been mired in crisis ever since a Sarajevo court sentenced Republika Srpska’s president, Milorad Dodik, to jail – in absentia – for contradicting rulings by the country’s constitutional court and an international peace envoy.
Dodik, who wants the region to become part of neighboring Serbia, argues that some centrally-run state institutions are illegitimate.
In late February, lawmakers in the Serb-dominated republic – one of two semi-independent entities that make up Bosnia – banned the state judicial system from operating on its territory, introducing punishments for those who work for it.
On Friday, Dodik called on all Serbs working in SIPA and the national judiciary to leave their jobs so that the autonomous government can provide them with work in its own institutions.
The regionalist drive has been condemned by the European Union, which said that laws targeting pan-Bosnian courts “undermine the constitutional and legal order” of Bosnia and “threaten fundamental freedoms of its citizens.”
Bosnia was internally divided into the Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina – populated mainly by Bosniaks and Croats – after the 1992-1995 war.
Over 100,000 people were killed in the conflict that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia.
