(Reuters) -The separatist president of the Serb part of Bosnia vowed to defy a court ruling banning him from political office for six years on Friday and said he would seek help from both Russia and U.S. President Donald Trump.
Milorad Dodik was responding to a ruling by Bosnia’s appeals court upholding a sentence handed down to him for defying the orders of the international peace envoy, whose role is to prevent multi-ethnic Bosnia sliding back into civil war.
Dodik told reporters he would continue to go to work.
“I do not accept the verdict,” he told reporters. “I will seek help from Russia and I will write a letter to the U.S. administration.”
He said he would ask his associates not to communicate with ambassadors from the European Union, which has a peacekeeping force in Bosnia to ensure stability that has deployed reserve forces over the crisis.
The sentence, handed down to Dodik in February for defying the Constitutional Court as well as the peace envoy, included a one-year prison term that under Bosnia’s legal system can possibly be exchanged for a fine.
His lawyer Goran Bubic said his team would appeal Friday’s appeals court ruling to the Constitutional Court and seek a temporary delay of the implementation of the verdict pending its decision.
Dodik’s conviction in February sparked uproar in Bosnia’s autonomous Serb Republic, triggering Bosnia’s worst political crisis since the conflict, which killed around 100,000 people in 1992-5.
A pro-Russian nationalist who seeks to split his region from Bosnia, Dodik responded with measures to reduce the state’s presence in the Serb Republic by ordering lawmakers to ban the state’s prosecutor, court, and intelligence agency.
The constitutional court then temporarily suspended the regional parliament’s legislation as endangering the constitutional and legal order and sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the formal name of the country.
Dodik is a long-time advocate of the secession of the Serb-dominated region, which along with the Bosniak-Croat Federation makes up Bosnia. The crisis precipitated by his separatist push represents one of the biggest threats to peace in the Balkans since the conflicts that followed Yugoslavia’s collapse.
(Reporting by Antonis Pothitos and Daria Sito-Sucic; Editing by Philippa Fletcher)
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