Anti-, pro-government rallies hled in Republika Srpska
The opponents and the supporters of Milorad Dodik, the president of the Serb-run autonomous entity Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina, have staged rival rallies in the territory’s de facto capital city, Banja Luka.
The opposition accused Dodik, who is under legal investigation for financial wrongdoing, of corruption in their rallies on Saturday. Dodik has also been blamed by opposition forces for the country’s ailing economic situation.
“Mile (Dodik), the thief, thought he scared people. No one can divide Serb people!” said Mladen Bosic, the head of the main opposition SDS party, part of the multi-ethnic coalition central government in Bosnia.
“Republika Srpska will be better led by real patriots, not by the false ones,” Milanko Mihaljica, the president of the extreme right radical party in the Bosnian Serb entity, told the crowd.
The opposition has demanded the departure of the strongman and called for early elections in fall.
The Saturday rally, with the participation of thousands of demonstrators, was the biggest opposition protest against Dodik since he took helm in 2010.
Dodik, who is the leader of the ruling Union of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD), had called on his supporters to stage a simultaneous rally in the city center, away from the opposition protest.
Dodik himself addressed supporters at the counter-rally, and accused the opposition of “betrayal.”
Both sides’ leaders had instructed their followers not to march across the ranks of the police forces dividing the demonstrators to avoid confrontations.
Since the end of the 1992-1995 inter-ethnic war, which claimed more than 100,000 lives, Bosnia and Herzegovina has been divided along ethnic lines into the two semi-independent entities of the Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation.
Sharing a long border with Serbia on the east and stretching along the north of Bosnia, Republika Srpska is populated by some 1.3 million people, mostly ethnic Serbs.
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