Several thousand Bosnian Serbs briefly blocked traffic on the main roads between the country’s two entities on Friday to protest the recent impeachment of their political leader Milorad Dodik, AFP reported.

The President of Republika Srpska (RS, the Bosnian-Serb entity), 64-year-old M. Dodik, was charged by the country’s central prosecutor’s office with failing to comply with the decisions of the International High Representative in Bosnia, an offense punishable by six months to five years.

The indictment announced on August 11, also directed against the director of the “Official Herald” of Serbia, Milos Lukic, has not yet been confirmed by the state court.

“This is the last red line for MS. We will protect our property and institutions, because if they are taken away from us, we will cease to exist. The RS is sacred and we will defend it,” Anja Lubojevic, vice president of the Serbian parliament, told AFP as she took part in a rally of several hundred people in a Sarajevo suburb.

During the march, demonstrators placed a portrait of Dodik, another with the image of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the flags of Serbia and Russia, AFP noted.

Under the slogan “The border exists”, demonstrations were held simultaneously in the region of Tuzla and Doboj (north), Nevesinje (southeast) and Sarajevo, which gathered several thousand people, Serbian media reported.

Demonstrations of this kind on the border between Bosnia’s entities, where there is no official control of the crossing, have been extremely rare since the end of a 1990s war that claimed nearly 100,000 lives.

Since the end of the intercommunal conflict, Bosnia has been divided into two entities, one Serbian (Republika Srpska, RS) and one Croat-Bosnian, linked by a weak central government.

Violation of settlement agreement

Shortly after the indictment was announced, Milorad Dodik condemned what he called “political harassment” by the US ambassador to Bosnia. The US Embassy dismissed the allegations as “ridiculous” and “absurd”.

In June, he called on the Serbian parliament to pass two laws banning the implementation in the RS of rulings by the country’s Constitutional Court and the International High Representative, who has discretionary powers to repeal or impose laws and dismiss elected representatives.

Despite the immediate cancellation of these two texts by the High Representative, the German diplomat Christian Schmidt, they were made public by Milorad Dodik.