Sergej Belous

🟠 A serious political crisis has been unfolding in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and, to be exact, in one constituent part of it – the entity of Republika Srpska – for a year already. The crisis in this post-Yugoslav country threatens the stability of the entire region. The opposition wants to sue the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance for accepting foreign loans without the approval of parliament. Recently, demonstrations were held by both opposition and government supporters in the capital Banja Luka. Nya Tider attended both demonstrations and interviewed leading figures on both sides.

🟠 The opposition leader Dragan Čavić, former President of Republika Srpska, tells Nya Tider about the work of the opposition and the recent demonstrations. He also explains his view on the Dayton Agreement, which he has been involved in negotiating, and which was a peace treaty between Bosnia and Herzegovina, Yugoslavia and Croatia, and resulted in the forming of a NATO peace force and a new constitution for Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1998 Čavić was deemed obstructing the Agreement and was therefore stripped of his parliamentary seat by the EU and forbidden to work politically for five years. Already in the elections of 2002 he however became Vice President and in 2006 he was elected President of the Republika Srpska.

🟠 Montenegro is the only country along the northern Mediterranean coast that is not a NATO member. On 19 May the Accession protocol was signed and the country is expected to be accepted as a NATO member in the spring of 2017. There has been no referendum about the issue and the population seems reluctant to join an alliance that bombed the country only 17 years ago. The opposition MP Andrija Mandić, who used to be deputy minister of the economy in the ex-Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, claims that the prime minister Milo Đukanović has been blackmailed to bring his country into NATO by the Western powers, who have gathered evidence against him during his time as the leader of a smuggle gang during the nineties.

🟠 The Serbian parlamentary elections on April 24th were won as expected by the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). The elections were held early, which is wildly interpreted as an attempt by Serbian Prime Minister Alexandar Vucić to capitalize on the support he still enjoys with currently stable popularity ratings as insurance against a possible loss in regular elections set for 2018.