BELGRADE (Reuters) – Bosnia’s international peace envoy, Christian Schmidt, said on Thursday he had ordered a halt of all budget allocations for the party of the secessionist Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, who is sought by state authorities.
The decision marks an escalation of Bosnia’s biggest political crisis since the end of the country’s war in the 1990s and a standoff between Dodik and Schmidt.
“I have decided to suspend all payments from budget funds for the financing of the SNSD and the United Srpska parties,” Schmidt told a news conference in Sarajevo.
The decision is effective immediately, he said, speaking through an interpreter.
The dispute threatens Bosnia’s stability and pits Dodik and his allies Russia and Serbia against the United States and the European Union.
Under the Dayton peace deal that those powers helped broker to end Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, Schmidt is the ultimate interpreter of Bosnia’s constitution.
However, Serbs do not recognise Schmidt because his appointment was not endorsed by the United Nations Security Council.
“I am not recognising him (Schmidt) and his decisions. I could not care less,” Dodik told reporters in response to Schmidt’s decision.
According to Bosnian laws each of the parties in parliament gets budget funding proportional to its strength, for use in election campaigns and other activities.
Dodik’s SNSD party is the biggest single party in the regional and state parliaments. In 2023, it received about one million euros ($1.14 million) from the budget, according to the state election commission.
United Srpska Party is led by the speaker of the regional parliament, Nenad Stevandic.
Dodik is a long-time advocate for the secession of the autonomous Serb Republic, one of two regions in Bosnia linked by a weak central government.
He initiated the current political crisis after he was sentenced in February to one year in prison and banned from politics for six years over defying rulings by Schmidt.
Last month, Interpol declined a request from Bosnia’s state court for an international arrest warrant for Dodik.
Bosnia’s state police, SIPA, said on Wednesday they had tried to arrest Dodik. On Thursday, regional N1 TV reported that heavily armed special police units were protecting Dodik while he was moving through East Sarajevo, bordering the capital.
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(Reporting by Ivana Sekularac and Aleksandar Vasovic; Editing by Alex Richardson and Aidan Lewis)
