KK Igokea

Bosnia's Central Election Commission, CIK, has postponed local elections due in October for six weeks, to November 15, after political rows held up the adoption of a budget for 2020 and funding for the ballot within the legally permitted deadline to start preparations. 

Bosnian state presidency member Milorad Dodik on Thursday dismissed illegal wiretapping charges filed by Bosnian Serb opposition parties and human rights groups as a joke.

The Bosnian State Prosecutor's Office is investigating a report from the State Border Police about the allegedly illegal issue of visas for thousands of citizens of Pakistan, Boris Grupesic, a spokesman for the Prosecutor's Office, confirmed to BIRN.

These are just a few examples of respectful tributes that have been paid to war crimes defendants and convicts in public spaces in Bosnia and Herzegovina over the past few years.

Amid a row in Bosnia over whether aid was being sent to the country on a selective basis, Hungary on Thursday sent a plane load of 200,000 masks and 10,000 protective suits.

President Vucic said after the meeting that Serbia would send hundreds of thousands of protective masks, gloves and new respirators to Republika Srpska.

Security Minister Fahrudin Radoncic wrote on Instagram on Monday that a Bosnian company had discussed with officials at the Iranian embassy in Sarajevo the possibility of selling aluminium oxide powder to Tehran in breach of US and EU sanctions.

But the day-to-day headlines obscure a bigger, simpler truth.

Dodik remains a threat to the central feature of the Dayton Peace Accords - peace in Bosnia, and thus the whole of the Western Balkans - because for a decade and a half he has faced virtually no meaningful consequence for his increasingly extremist positions.

Inaction should shame Europe

However, this analysis misses the broader strategic picture - that the external scaffolding supporting the Bosnian state has all but collapsed, creating circumstances in which the RS can break away from Bosnia.

Battle of wills that began at Dayton:

Signing the Dayton Agreement. Photo: Wikimedia commons/NATO

Namely, according to Govedarica, Milo Djukanovic warned a Serb member of the BiH Presidency that all members of his party and him personally would banned from entering Montenegro if the Republika Srpska Parliament adopts the Declaration on the Position of Serbs in Montenegro.