Bosnian authorities on Friday, July 4, dropped an arrest warrant against Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, wanted over accusations of "attacking the constitutional order" with a series of secessionist moves in the divided Balkan nation.
After months of ignoring calls from him to speak with the authorities, Dodik voluntarily reported to the public prosecutor's office, accompanied by his lawyer, "to be questioned as a suspect in the investigation," the prosecutor's office and Bosnian State Court said in a joint statement. The court then accepted prosecutors' proposal to "terminate" the warrant, and Dodik was given conditional release, it said.
Since the end of its bloody inter-ethnic war in 1995, Bosnia has been split between two autonomous halves − the Serbs' Republika Srpska and a Muslim-Croat Federation. Each has its own government and parliament, with only weak central institutions binding the country of 3.5 million people together.
Dodik, the president of Republika Srpska, has been wanted by the Bosnian authorities since March 18 for banning the central police and judiciary − a move deemed secessionist by prosecutors. In February, Dodik, 66, was sentenced to one year in prison and banned from holding political office for six years for failing to comply with decisions of the international high representative who oversees the peace accord that ended Bosnia's bloody inter-ethnic war in 1995.
His move to ban the central police and judiciary came in reaction to the sentence, which plunged Bosnia into a political and institutional crisis, described by many as the most serious since the end of the war.