The separatist-minded leader of the mostly ethnic Serb part of Bosnia-Herzegovina has repeated his threat to rip the country apart and wreak new havoc on the Balkans if the international community further strengthens multiethnic institutions.
In an interview with AP on December 29, Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik said he was "not irrational [and] I know that America's response will be to use force" but he won't be "frightened...into sacrificing [Serbian] national interests."
Since a 1995 peace deal known as the Dayton agreements ended intense ethnically fueled war in the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia has been administered under a Bosniak and Croat federation and a mostly Serb-populated entity known as Republika Srpska.
It is also overseen by a civilian high representative with UN backing and sweeping powers, currently German Christian Schmidt.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs James O'Brien said on December 28 that Washington will take action if there are efforts to unilaterally alter "the basic element" of the post-1995 architecture.
There is "no right of secession," O'Brien said.
Dodik has spent the past two years trying to erode central Bosnian authority and establishing parallel institutions to further his longtime threats to divide the country for good.
Many groups cling fiercely to ethnic divisions despite decades of international mediation to settle grievances among Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, and other former parts of Yugoslavia. Serbs are the most numerous of the ethno-national groups in the region.
"Among Serbs, one thing is clear and definite and that is a growing realization that the years and decades ahead of us are the years and decades of Serb national unification," Dodik told AP.
Dodik has also cultivated increasingly close ties to Moscow, which has tried to exploit religious and cultural affinities in the region.
He has also courted -- and been courted by -- national populist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has resisted anti-Russian sanctions and battled publicly with the European Union.
"Brussels is using the promise of EU accession as a tool to unitarize Bosnia," Dodik said, adding, "In principle, our policy still is that we want to join [the EU], but we no longer see that as our only alternative."
EU officials who asked for anonymity to discuss the situation after similar comments earlier this week by Dodik insisted to RFE/RL's Balkan Service that Republika Srpska independence is a moot issue because of the resulting isolation it would bring.
"Any random remarks by Dodik are not really worth commenting on," one EU official said. "Apart from his only 'friend' in Europe, Orban and no one else, Dodik knows very well that the talk of the independence of Republika Srpska is nonsense because such an entity would be politically and economically totally isolated, and it would only bring more trouble to its people."