Human Rights Campaigner: Serbia's leadership never gave up on a 'Greater Serbia'

N1

Bosnia’s Presidency Chairman, Serb leader Milorad Dodik, is undermining the country’s institutions since 2008 but the maps of how Bosnia should be divided are drawn in Belgrade and Dodik is just exposing them in public, Serbian activist Sonja Biserko told N1 on Wednesday.

“There is one slogan which often comes up in our ministry, ‘if Kosovo is not Serbia – Republika Srpska is not Bosnia’,” Biserko said.

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The idea that Serbia should get Bosnia's Serb-majority half, called Republika Srpska (RS), if it loses Kosovo has come up in connection with the negotiations between Belgrade and Pristina about the status of Kosovo.

“They want to get Republika Srpska out of Kosovo’s independence. That has been part of the game from the start, and it is impossible. I hope it will not be possible in the future either,” Biserko said.

Serbia is leading a “systematic policy and strategy which it defined in 1997” which entails keeping Republika Srpska for itself by preventing the return of non-Serbs to the province and integrating Serbia and the RS economically and culturally.

“And they succeeded in many ways,” she said.

Biserko explained that Belgrade’s strategy is contained in a document named the ‘Memorandum II’, “which defines the exact steps that need to be taken” to make it happen while waiting “for the moment when Bosnia and Herzegovina will break up by itself, as it is unfunctional, which is what Dodik and politicians in Serbia mention daily.”

Serbia’s leaders have never given up on the idea of a ‘Greater Serbia’, she said.

“At the same time they are talking about returning Montenegro into the internal framework, they treat Montenegro as an internal issue,” she added.

Dodik recently redrew the borders between Bosnia and Serbia, saying that some kind of integration between Serbia, Bosnia’s Republika Srpska (RS) entity and Serb-dominated part of Montenegro must happen in the future.

“That is not his map. It is drawn up in Serbia, in Belgrade. He just presents it so that everyone knows what is going on. What Serbia and the elite are doing is no secret,” she said, arguing that it is all written down, “it just needs to be followed.”