SARAJEVO (Reuters) -The parliament of Bosnia’s autonomous Serb Republic has approved a government reshuffle that the opposition says is illegal because it was initiated by the region’s president who has been banned from politics.
The vote late on Tuesday deepens a crisis over a Serb separatist drive that amounts to one of the biggest threats to peace in the Balkans since the wars that followed Yugoslavia’s collapse.
The Serb Republic makes up Bosnia and Herzegovina along with a federation shared by Bosniaks and Croats under the Dayton peace accords that ended a 1992-95 conflict that killed about 100,000 people and displaced around 2 million.
The Serb Republic government reshuffle was set in motion by Milorad Dodik, who last month was stripped of his mandate as the Serb Republic’s president by Bosnia’s election commission.
An appeals court had earlier upheld a verdict jailing Dodik for a year and banning him from politics for six years for defying the rulings of the international envoy who oversees civilian implementation of the Dayton accords.
Dodik, a Russian-backed separatist who wants the Serb region to secede from Bosnia, has rejected the commission’s decision and stayed on, but the election commission has called a November 23 election to elect a successor.
Saying changes were needed in the Serb Republic’s government to meet “challenges ahead”, Dodik asked regional Prime Minister Radovan Viskovic to resign and nominated former agriculture minister Savo Minic to replace him.
The reshuffled government, which includes only four new faces, was approved by 50 deputies from the governing coalition led by Dodik’s SNSD party.
Opposition deputies did not attend the vote. They said the government would be illegal because Dodik had lost his mandate as president.
Minic said the government would work to return Bosnia to what he depicted as post-war basics, echoing Dodik’s stance that only institutions that existed in the so-called “original Dayton deal” were acceptable to Bosnian Serbs.
Minic announced a referendum on Dodik’s status and said the Serb Republic had the right to self-determination.
(Reporting by Daria Sito-Sucic)
Comments