Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik visited Belgrade on Wednesday, where he met with Serbia’s president, Tomislav Nikolic, to discuss the recent terrorist attack on a police station in the RS. Nikolic pledged Serbia’s support for the RS, and stressed that international cooperation is crucial to the fight against terrorism.
“It is obvious that all the states in the Balkans must establish stronger and more concrete cooperation, that services must cooperate and exchange information,” Nikolic said on April 29, after meeting Milorad Dodik, the Republika Srpska President.
Following the fatal attack by an Islamist gunman in Zvornik, eastern Bosnia, Dodik said he had discussed possible exchanges of information on terrorist threats in the region with Serbia’s leaders.
“We know this terrorist was a member of one nation but we also know that all Bosniak people do not cherish those values and that we have to cooperate in order to fight extremism,” Dodik said on Wednesday in Belgrade.
President Dodik told press, after his meeting with Nikolic, that while cooperation is a priority of the RS, the unconstitutional removal of some competencies from the entities of BiH put the RS at risk.
“I heard from everybody [in Belgrade] – both the president and prime minister, and others, that they respect the Dayton Peace Agreement, that they respect the fact that BiH exists, with its territorial integrity, but also they never failed to say that Srpska, as a strong segment of BiH, has Serbia’s support, within the spheres of its competences,” he said.
President Dodik noted that some of the competences had been significantly reduced, by means of the violence of the international community, which had resulted in the possibility for inefficiency of the security system itself.
Dodik pointed out that Republika Srpska, following the events in Zvornik, would create its new strategy on the security structure, and would strongly, and without hesitation, develop its constitutional competences to the maximum level possible.
He added that Srpska would cooperate with the security bodies of FBiH, and with Croatia and Serbia, and with all those taking part in the fight against terrorism, because fight against terrorism could not be isolated. There exists no power in the world that can confront this alone, because, if there were such a power, this would have been finished long time ago.
