Bosnian Serb Leader Milorad Dodik Declared Bosnia And Herzegovina “Dead”

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Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik declared Bosnia and Herzegovina “dead” and “an impossible country” just days before the country’s general election, in a return to his long-held stance against the country created by the Dayton agreement that ended the Bosnian war in 1995.

Speaking in front of a crowd of tens of thousands of supporters of the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD), the party he chairs, in Banja Luka on Friday, Dodik said that Bosnia and Herzegovina “has never been more divided” and that the country “is meaningless”. “It is only an empty shell for those who try to maintain it, so that something of theirs would be right,” he added, in comments reported by Serbian news website Argumenti. “Today BiH is still an obligation, nothing more. BiH is dead, an impossible country that makes no sense,” he said.

He accused Bosniak politicians of competing over who could “insult” Republika Srpska the most, and said that the settlement imposed on Bosnia and Herzegovina by the international community after the war was a “bluff” that created a country “that cannot live.”

The comments came during the final campaign rally of Bosnian Serb parties ahead of general elections set to take place on Sunday, October 4, the first general elections in nearly three decades in which Dodik himself is not on the ballot, as he was sentenced in February 2025 to one year in prison and a six-year ban from politics for violating the authority of the international High Representative who oversees implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement.

Despite that sentence, however, he remains free and the SNSD is running in the elections under the name “SNSD – Milorad Dodik.” His son, Igor, is also running in the elections, on the SNSD list in Banja Luka. The current president of Republika Srpska, SNSD ally Siniša Karan, won a snap election held several months ago after irregularities were found in the first round, and were therefore annulled. Dodik has long argued that Republika Srpska should loosen its ties to Bosnia and Herzegovina, or even leave the country altogether.

In comments made just a day prior to speaking in Banja Luka on Friday, he said that Republika Srpska “is not interested in BiH, except as Dayton agreed upon.” He added that it was “better to have full authority over part of the country, rather than none over the whole of it.” In comments made on a US-based podcast just a few days earlier, however, he went much further, claiming that “Christians in Bosnia no longer want to live under Muslim rule” and that therefore “Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a place for us.”

The country’s constitution is based on a system of government that distributes powers equally between Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats in both the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the entity of Republika Srpska. But Dodik’s party and its allies are running on a completely opposite platform in these elections, calling for a rejection of a possible NATO membership for Bosnia, branding the current state “anti-Dayton”, and demanding that Serb representatives in the country’s parliament in Sarajevo vote as a single bloc.

Opposite them, opposition parties in Republika Srpska have formed joint lists of candidates in several races, and could potentially deprive SNSD leaders of seats in parliament. But that will not be clear until the results of these elections are published on Sunday night. The elections are also historic in that they are the first to be held in Bosnia and Herzegovina without an active High Representative, as the current Agreement is slowly but surely being turned into a peaceful “dead letter”, in accordance with Dodik’s wishes.

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