SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Bosnia’s international peace envoy warned Bosnian Serbs on Monday they will face unspecified consequences if they break the terms of a peace deal by refusing to recognise his decrees and laws.
Christian Schmidt oversees the U.S.-sponsored Dayton peace accord that ended the Balkan country’s war in the 1990s, and has the power to sack officials and impose laws.
Leaders in the Serb region of Bosnia – who have threatened to secede – do not recognise Schmidt in his official post as High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina and have not met him since he took up the post in 2021.
They have said their assembly will adopt draft legislation on Wednesday that stops them publishing his decrees and laws in the Official Gazette, meaning that they would not be recognised as official legislation.
Schmidt, a former German government minister, said on Monday all the parties to the peace deal had committed to cooperate with his office.
“Officials who, through action or inaction, disregard their legal duties, as well as these obligations, bear personal responsibility for their decisions and the consequences of such decisions,” Schmidt said.
“They should be aware that they will be sailing in heavy waters”.
The Dayton peace accords ended nearly four years of war, in which about 100,000 died, by splitting Bosnia into two autonomous regions, the Serb-dominated Serb Republic and the Federation shared by Bosniaks and Croats, linked by a weak central government.
Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik’s hardline Serb nationalism, and his pro-Russian stance, have raised concern that Bosnia might fracture again along ethnic lines, a generation after the conflict.
(Reporting by Daria Sito-Sucic; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
