Milorad Dodik, Serb member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, speaks during an interview in his office in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina November 11, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
January 5, 2022
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The United States on Wednesday imposed fresh sanctions on Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik and current and former officials as Washington warned of further action against those linked to destabilization or corruption.
The U.S. Treasury Department in a statement accused Dodik, already subject to U.S. sanctions under a different authority, of corruption and threatening the stability and territorial integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Treasury also slapped sanctions on media outlet Alternativna Televizija d.o.o. Banja Luka, accusing Dodik of acquiring it to further his own agenda and exerting personal control over it.
The Treasury designations are the first use of an executive order issued in June allowing the United States to target those threatening peace or stability in the Western Balkans.
The U.S. State Department also barred current and former Bosnia and Herzegovina officials from entering the United States, targeting Milan Tegeltija, a former president of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s high judicial council, and Mirsad Kukic, a lawmaker and president of the Movement for Democratic Action.
“Other leaders and entities linked to corrupt or destabilizing actors may also be subject to future actions by the U.S. Government,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned in a separate statement.
Bosnia is experiencing its gravest political crisis since the end of the war in the 1990s, reviving fears of a breakup after Bosnian Serbs blocked the work of the central government and Serb lawmakers voted to start pulling the autonomous Serb Republic out of state institutions.
Dodik, who serves as the Serb member of Bosnia’s tripartite inter-ethnic presidency, wants to roll back all reforms made after the war and return to the 1995 constitution under which the state was represented by basic institutions only while all powers had belonged to the regions.
“Milorad Dodik’s destabilizing corrupt activities and attempts to dismantle the Dayton Peace Accords, motivated by his own self-interest, threaten the stability of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the entire region,” Brian Nelson, Treasury’s under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in the statement.
The U.S.-brokered Dayton peace agreement in 1995 ended three-and-a-half years of ethnic warfare in Bosnia. Some 100,000 people were killed in the conflict and 2 million forced from their homes.
Dodik said earlier on Wednesday that he was not worried about the sanctions, which he said illustrate U.S. “impotence” rather than power.
“As for the United States, they behave in an arrogant way anyway, what they are doing is useless,” Dodik told the regional N1 television during a public event in the Bosnian town of Banja Luka, though he added he was sorry that he and his entity had a problem with the United States.
“But what their mid-ranking officials say is not the Holy Scriptures,” he said.
(Reporting by Daphne Psaledakis in Washington and Daria Sito-Sucic in SarajevoAdditional reporting by David Ljunggren in OttawaEditing by Paul Simao and Matthew Lewis)
Source: One America News Network
