DODIK: REPUBLIKA SRPSKA ENTITLED TO AUTHORITIES DEFINED UNDER DAYTON

BANJA LUKA, DECEMBER 12 /SRNA/ – Republika Srpska must be able to restore the competences granted to it under the Dayton Peace Accords because that is its right, SNSD leader Milorad Dodik has stated.

Dodik noted that, despite the extensive stripping of its authorities, Republika Srpska has not been completely defeated in the process of dismantling the Dayton framework.

"We must be capable of reclaiming all of it again, because that is our right," Dodik said.

He pointed out that the erosion of the Dayton Peace Accords under various political pressures, both internal and external, unfortunately began on the very day it was signed in Paris and has continued to this day.

"Dayton has in practice been heavily dismantled and rendered unusable in many aspects of its general application. It is being abused, and a parallel, unconstitutional and anti-Dayton system of governance has been created in BiH. And that system now dominates," Dodik told reporters in Banja Luka after the roundtable "Thirty Years of the Dayton Peace Accords," organized by the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Republika Srpska /ANURS/.

Dodik said that Democrats in earlier US administrations supported robust impositions and encouraged Bosniaks to dismantle Dayton in favor of creating a unitary BiH in which Muslims would be the majority and Serbs a minority.

"They promised the Bosniaks a functional, meaning unitary, BiH immediately after Dayton was signed," Dodik stated, adding that Serbs in BiH have consistently opposed that.

He noted that although Dayton, unsatisfactory to all sides even today, brought the much-needed peace, it became a camouflage used to avoid the essence: building a constitutional, legal, and political order in which the constituent peoples would be equal.

Dodik said that Dayton was intended to be a lasting document, celebrated as one of the greatest achievements of the US administration at the time, with support from Brussels, yet it clearly has not become that.

"Bosniaks immediately said it was a straitjacket forced onto them. They have been tearing it down ever since, with the help of various foreign actors, and blaming us for it, even though we have defended Dayton. That is the absurdity of BiH. As Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić said, when you enter Bosnia, logic stops. There is no logic here, only destruction," Dodik said.