


Those Balkan wars left roughly 140,000 people dead, drew in NATO warplanes and soldiers and created a rift between Russia and the West that remains today. It was in Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, that a teenage Serb nationalist set off World War I by assassinating an Austrian archduke in June 1914, and where the seemingly deranged rants of a Serb psychiatrist, Radovan Karadzic, presaged a three-year spree of bloodletting in the 1990s. He also wants out of the state’s tax agency, its intelligence service and its judiciary, vowing to accelerate what he calls the “peaceful dissolution” of a Bosnian state birthed by a peace deal forged in 1995 in Dayton, Ohio. Since then, he has threatened to pull out of Bosnia’s multiethnic armed forces and form his own, exclusively Serb army.

Dodik announced that he was creating his own medicines agency and withdrawing his fief, which covers roughly half of Bosnia’s territory, from the oversight of central government inspectors. BANJA LUKA, Bosnia and Herzegovina - When Bosnia’s medicines agency inspected oxygen sold to hospitals to treat Covid-19 patients in the country’s Serb-controlled region in September, it made a shocking discovery: The oxygen was meant for use only in industrial machines, not on human beings.īut rather than trying to correct the situation, the region’s leader, Milorad Dodik, a pugnacious Serb nationalist, instead tried to tear apart the multiethnic fabric of the Bosnian state, a fragile union created in 1995 by American diplomacy out of the wreckage of war.įirst, Mr.
