Croatian analyst: For Vucic, everything has gone in an irreversible direction

The situation in the Balkans, right next to Croatia, has again smelt of gunpowder in recent weeks. Student protests against the government of President Aleksandar Vucic have been taking place across Serbia since 1 November last year, when 15 people died in the collapse of a concrete canopy at the Novi Sad train station.

At the same time, Bosnia and Herzegovina is going through probably the worst political crisis in the 30 years since the Dayton Agreement.

The situation in BiH has recently escalated again with the verdict against Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik, who was sentenced by a BiH court to a year in prison and a six-year ban from holding political office for disrespecting the decisions of the High Representative for BiH, Christian Schmidt.

On Wednesday, after the BiH Prosecutor’s Office requested the arrest of Dodik and two other senior Republika Srpska officials for questioning, the Parliament in Banja Luka decided to start the process of adopting a new constitution for the entity. Dodik’s office is guarded by special forces with long barrels, and in the meantime he eloquently says that “soon everything will look like it did when Yugoslavia broke up”.

N1 Croatian analyst Denis Avdagic asks whether, in order to protect themselves and their positions, Vucic and Dodik are ready to take steps that could ignite the Balkan “powder keg”.

“They have been speculating about it all the time.” “Neither of them is a political suicide bomber, but at the moment they are both in probably the most difficult political moment since they came to power,” he says.

Two steps over the red line

According to Avdagić, Dodik has crossed the red line at least two steps, which he used to stop regularly.

“I don’t see where to go from here, what retreat he can make.” He is under international sanctions and now has a first instance judgment and an arrest warrant. “It is very, very difficult to give in to him and he is probably hoping that his behaviour will cause a reaction at the international level, that he will get some concession to solve his problems,” Avdagic stresses.

“For Vucic, everything has gone into reverse”

As for Vucic, Avdagic says he too is increasingly showing nervousness and concern.

“It is obvious that he is making a lot of missteps.” A prime example is the injured plain-clothes policeman, who was first used as propaganda, but soon found out what really happened. At the moment, it is difficult to say whether Vucic can meet the demands of the students. He could elegantly withdraw from everything and say that, as President, he will not interfere. But he did not do that. “In fact, he started calling the protesters names, giving them various epithets and everything went in a direction that was irreversible for him”, he says.

Did they do everything Moscow expected?

Would Vucic and Dodik then have resorted to escalating the crisis? Avdagić notes that there has been much hypothetical talk about this.

“It is very unpleasant to hear that Vucic already knows what will happen if the situation escalates.” There is a feeling that something like this could happen, a kind of ‘false flag’ operation. There is even mention of arresting all the leaders of the Serbian opposition. But any moves by Vucic would put him in the same position as Slobodan Milosevic before his fall. We know where Milosevic ended up then – he was extradited to The Hague. We would have had no one to hand Vucic over to. He would stay in Serbia, unless both he and Dodik realise that their skin is safer elsewhere. Bashar al-Assad ended up in Moscow, so perhaps it is not a problem for the two of them to go there too. But the question is whether they would still be welcome there. “Have they done everything that was expected of them?”.

/danas.rs