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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1758 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 11, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Bosnia

Bosnian Republika Srpska’s long-time secession sympathizing leader Milorad Dodik has been kicking up extra dust lately. He’s been in the news for the past few years for threatening to withdraw from all of the country's federated institutions, like the court system and military, and for threatening to arrest the international peace envoy, and so forth. This Monday he illegally held a public celebration for Serbian independence day, banned by the court system for discrimination (and the legacy of the Serbian led ethnic cleansing in Bosnia). His intentions were pretty clear:

Bosnian Serbs are already "mentally integrated" into Serbia and would gladly support independence from Bosnia, their political leader Milorad Dodik told AFP just ahead of a controversial "national holiday"...

"We do not want to stay here," Dodik, president of Republika Srpska (RS), told AFP on Monday.

The US responded to this slight in traditional hegemonic fashion by flying two fighter jets over Bosnia. Dodik has waffled on claiming he wants secession outright but doesn’t seem to be backing down from the fight in general:

“I am not irrational, I know that America’s response will be to use force … but I have no reason to be frightened by that into sacrificing (Serb) national interests,” Milorad Dodik, the president of Bosnia’s Serb-run part, told The Associated Press in an interview Friday.

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