SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Bosnia’s Serb Republic police drove state police officers out of a building in the region’s main city of Banja Luka on Friday, a move aimed at implementing separatist legislation passed by parliament and signed by leader Milorad Dodik.
A state court last week sentenced Dodik, the Serb Republic’s president, to a year in prison and banned him from politics for six years. He rejected the verdict and next day the Serb regional parliament passed legislation barring the national police and judiciary from its territory.
Dodik, a pro-Russian nationalist, signed the separatist laws on Wednesday evening. On Thursday, the state prosecutors’ office said it was investigating what it described as the criminal act of an attack on Bosnia and Herzegovina’s constitutional order.
Dodik called on Friday on all Serbs working in the State Information and Protection Agency (SIPA), the state court and prosecutors’ office, and the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council, to leave their jobs so that the Serb Republic provides them with employment in its own institutions.
At a press conference on Friday with outgoing Prime Minister Milos Vucevic in Banja Luka, Dodik was asked about the raid by the Serb Republic police on the SIPA building in the city.
“If the situation is as you say, it means that the laws passed by Republika Srpska (Serb Republic) are being implemented,” he said.
Dodik says the state judiciary, prosecutors and police are not constitutional because they were not envisaged in the Dayton peace accords that ended the 1992-95 war among Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Bosniak Muslims in which 100,000 were killed.
The Serb Republic police also entered the SIPA headquarters in the town of East Sarajevo, local media reported. Reuters could not independently verify the media reports.
(Reporting by Daria Sito-Sucic, Editing by Christina Fincher and Timothy Heritage)
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