There is an old saying about the Balkans – ‘long memories and long knives’. Case in point: Milorad Dodik. Newly elected to Bosnia-Herzegovina’s three-member rotating presidency (shared with a Croat and Bosnian Muslim or Bosniak incumbent), the 60-year-old has all the qualities the world has come to expect of a Serbian nationalist – intransigence and narrow-mindedness stoked by a prevailing sense of victimhood and betrayal. He is vocally dedicated to the destruction of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the very country he now presides over. Dodik opines that separation of the Serbian enclave is his goal and has promised Srpska voters an independence referendum. Such separation should be accomplished ‘peacefully, if possible,’ he says. But if not? Some 200,000 people died in the last Bosnian war, which lasted 43 months in the mid-1990s. So what’s a couple of hundred thousand more?
All the usual ingredients of Serb nationalism are bubbling up as Dodik plays the patriot game. Front and centre is the denial of Serb responsibility for a multitude of war crimes, including the infamous 1995 Srebrenica massacre, when over 8,000 male Muslim prisoners were butchered by Bosnian Serb forces. When the subject comes up, Dodik is all denials – quickly switching to Serb suffering. For him, Bosnian Serbs are a besieged and benighted people, suffering brutal treatment and false accusations for decades if not centuries. Sadly, it is a view widely shared among the voters of Republika Srpska.
