EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell urged the bloc’s foreign ministers to take quick action to prevent a “critical” crisis in Bosnia-Herzegovina from breaking apart the fragile Western Balkan nation.
"The nationalists' and separatists' rhetoric is increasing in Bosnia-Herzegovina and jeopardizing the stability and even the integrity of the country," Borrell told reporters on the sidelines of the EU foreign ministers summit in Brussels on February 21.
"The ministers have to take decisions about how to stop this dynamic in Bosnia-Herzegovina and to avoid that the country can fall apart in pieces. This is a critical situation," he said.
Borrell expressed alarm on February 20 over "centrifugal trends" in Bosnia one day after Bosnian Croat nationalists threatened to scupper upcoming elections and form their own region in that troubled nation.
Borrell warned fellow leaders at the Munich Security Conference that the situation is "more worrying than ever" for the former Yugoslav republic, which is already divided into a Bosniak and Croat federation and a Serb-dominated entity called Republika Srpska.
"The situation in Bosnia is more worrying than ever," Borrell said, "It has never been easy, but the centrifugal trends now are really very worrying."
Bosnia has been going through its worst political crisis since the end of the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
Deputies in the parliament of the ethnic-Serb entity earlier this month adopted the draft version of a law to create a separate judicial system from the rest of the country, a move outside officials say is illegal and which has faced strong opposition from the United States and EU.
The action is being pressed by Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of Bosnia's tripartite presidency, and is part of moves to separate the entity's military, police, and tax administration from the central Bosnian government, actions that contravene 1995 Dayton accords that ended the Bosnian wars.
Washington slapped new sanctions on Dodik earlier this year.
The U.S. Treasury Department on January 5 accused Dodik -- already subject to U.S. sanctions under a different authority -- of corruption and threatening the stability and territorial integrity of Bosnia-Herzegovina
According to an internal EU document reviewed last week by Reuters, the EU should consider sanctions on the ethnic-Serb entity and withhold financial support if the crisis continues to worsen.
The Dayton accords ended the war in ethnically divided Bosnia that killed more than 100,000 people and left millions homeless.
The accords created two highly autonomous entities that share some joint institutions: Republika Srpska and the Bosniak-Croat Federation. The country is governed and administered along ethnic lines established by the agreement, with a weak and often dysfunctional central government.