By Daria Sito-Sucic
SARAJEVO (Reuters) -Bosnian state prosecutors on Wednesday ordered the arrest of Russian-backed Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik and his aides for ignoring a court summons, raising the stakes in a standoff that threatens the Balkan country’s stability.
The state prosecutors’ office is investigating Dodik, the separatist president of Bosnia’s autonomous Serb Republic, for what it calls an attack on constitutional order after he initiated the adoption of laws barring state judiciary and police from the region.
“We have received a request from the court police of Bosnia and Herzegovina to assist them,” a spokesperson from the State Investigation and Protection Agency, Jelena Miovcic, said.
Dodik had initiated the bans on the state judiciary and police after he was sentenced to a year in jail for defying the rulings of an international peace envoy.
He has two weeks to appeal that sentence.
It was not clear if the plan was to detain Dodik or to accompany him to answer the summons.
Serb Republic television, citing the regional government, reported that the state prosecution has also ordered the arrest of Serb Republic Prime Minister Radovan Viskovic and regional parliament president Nenad Stevandic over ignoring summons in the case of the attack on constitutional order.
On Wednesday, the Serb region’s parliament convened in a bid to adopt the Serb Republic’s new constitution, which would annul all reforms agreed in decades following the signing of the Dayton peace agreement that ended the Bosnian 1992-95 war.
Stasa Kosarac, the foreign trade minister in the central government and member of the Dodik’s SNSD ruling party, said that “unconstitutional institutions” cannot arrest Bosnian Serb leaders for doing their jobs.
“Nobody will arrest President Dodik and the Srpska leadership,” Kosarac told the Srna news agency.
The Europen Union peacekeeping force EUFOR said on Tuesday that it begun deploying reserve forces in Bosnia to maintain stability and security.
The crisis in Bosnia has pitted the West against Russia, which along with Serbia and Hungary has supported Dodik.
Moscow has called the Bosnian court’s ruling “a strike on stability in the Balkan region”.
U.S. State Department Secretary Marco Rubio however said that Dodik’s actions were undermining Bosnia’s institutions and threatening its security and stability, calling on U.S.
partners in the region “to join us in pushing back against this dangerous and destabilizing behavior”.
His statement was a blow to Dodik who hopes that President Donald Trump’s administration will favor the Serb separatist agenda.
International peace envoy Christian Schmidt warned that changing the constitution was a violation of the peace deal and represents ” a serious danger” and called on MPs to reject “this attack on the constitutional order of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the multi-ethnic character of Republika Srpska”.
The Serb Republic and the Bosniak-Croat Federation are two regions created after the war in which 100,000 died.
They are linked by a weak central government in a state supervised by an international authority to stop it slipping back into conflict.
(Reporting by Daria Sito-Sucic, Editing by Timothy Heritage and Philippa Fletcher)
