DODIK: BiH IS A FAILED COUNTRY, REPUBLIKA SRPSKA SHOULD PURSUE ITS OWN DEVELOPMENT

BANJA LUKA, JUNE 12 /SRNA/ – SNSD President Milorad Dodik said that BiH is a failed country in which Serbs do not want to live, but instead want to develop Republika Srpska and govern it in their own way.

"America does not need to spend resources on the US Embassy in Sarajevo because BiH is a failed country", Dodik said in a podcast hosted by American journalist Lara Logan. Dodik stated that the Serb people in BiH do not want to be subjected to repression and said it remains unclear why political Sarajevo insists so strongly on keeping Serbs within BiH. "We were here before the arrival of Islam, so it is more natural that we have claims to this land. We have no problem with their presence; we have our Republika Srpska and we want to govern it in our own way", Dodik said. He explained that even people who were too young to take part in the war in BiH during the 1990s do not want to be oppressed by the authorities in Sarajevo. "I do not want to govern Muslims, but at the same time I do not want them governing here", Dodik said. He reminded that historical hostility toward Serbs resulted in the loss of half of the Serb population in the two world wars, "most of them at the hands of Muslims and Croats loyal to the occupiers". "CNN promoted the story that Serbs killed 300,000 Muslims and raped 60,000 Muslim women. That was, of course, a lie, but it created an atmosphere of hatred and served as a catalyst for the involvement of international forces in the conflict", Dodik said. He added that it was later established that a total of 96,000 people were killed during the war in BiH and that, proportionally, the same number of victims came from all three constituent peoples. "We constantly hear the same lies, the ones created by the neoliberal structures of Washington and Brussels at the time", Dodik said. He reiterated that the legitimacy of the High Representative in BiH requires approval by the UN Security Council. "Former US Ambassador Michael Murphy regularly posted on X that the authorities of Republika Srpska should not be recognized and that people should wait until President Trump's term had passed", Dodik said. Logan noted that despite the fact that President Trump leads US foreign policy, certain elements within the State Department continue to pursue their own policies while waiting for him to leave office, to which Dodik responded that this also concerns Serbs. "President Trump nominated an American of Serbian origin as ambassador to Serbia, but he passed away while waiting for confirmation by the Senate and Congress", Dodik noted. Asked about crimes committed during the civil war, Dodik said he opposes what he described as the incorrect but widely accepted narrative portraying Serbs as "the sole criminals and the other peoples as victims", and that he wants objective consideration of both Serb victims and crimes committed against them by members of other ethnic groups. "The fact that only Serbs are tried before the Hague Tribunal creates new divisions and is not a path toward reconciliation", he stressed. Dodik added that Serbs in the region had once advocated for Yugoslavia as a state in which all Serbs could live together, but that they had unfortunately been naïve. "At the end of the First World War, the other Yugoslav peoples were largely allies of the aggressors, and by defeating them we brought freedom to those peoples. If, at the end of the 20th century, those peoples no longer wanted to remain in the same state with the Serbs, why are they now forcing us to remain in a common BiH with them"? Dodik asked.