Bosnia's Dodik: From moderate to genocide-denying autocrat
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — He was once described in Washington as an anti-nationalist “breath of fresh air” in the murderous, genocide-scarred Balkan morass of ethnically divided Bosnia.
How times change.
This week Bosnian Serb political leader Milorad Dodik, now a genocide-denying secessionist, was slapped with new U.S. sanctions for alleged corruption. He responded in typical style, saying the days when the United States and other Western democracies “modeled Bosnia to their taste” are long gone.
Accusations he corruptly amassed vast wealth for himself, his relatives and associates, are “monstrous lies,” Dodik claimed.
“The U.S. is a great power, but they are also big liars,” he said.
Dodik maintains the West is punishing him for championing the rights of ethnic Serbs in Bosnia — a dysfunctional country of 3.3 million that's never truly recovered from a fratricidal war in the 1990s that became a byname for ethnic cleansing and genocide.
The sanctions, Dodik boasted, will just help the Serbs break free of Bosnia into the eager embrace of their “true friends" — Russia, China, the champions of illiberal democracy within the European Union, and neighboring Serbia.
The 63-year-old political science graduate first came to prominence in 1998, as a moderate reformist narrowly elected regional prime minister of Republika Srpska, one of Bosnia's two postwar administrative units. NATO-led peacekeepers surrounded key buildings held by police loyal to Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic — later convicted of wartime genocide and crimes against humanity — to ensure Dodik could take control.
Shortly after, then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met him and "felt like a breath of fresh air had blown through the room,” according to her spokesman at the time.
But...