BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 4 Aug: Serbia will ignore U.S. sanctions recently imposed on top Bosnian Serb officials for undermining a 1995 peace agreement that ended a war that left more than 100,000 dead and millions homeless, the Serbian president said Friday.
\nSerbian President Aleksandar Vucic said that the sanctioned ethnic Serb officials from neighboring Bosnia will still be welcome in Serbia.
\n\u201cThe Republic of Serbia will treat the sanctions as if they did not exist,\u201d Vucic said, during a visit to the Serb region of Bosnia. \u201cIt is hard, but that\u2019s the only possible decision.\u201d
\nThe four Bosnian Serb officials sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury on Monday include Zeljka Cvijanovic, a Serb member of the tripartite collective Bosnian presidency, as well as the prime minister of the Serb entity in Bosnia, Radovan Viskovic. The separatist leader of the Bosnian Serb entity, Milorad Dodik, has earlier been sanctioned by the U.S.
\nThe four are alleged to have taken part in drafting a law that U.S. and other international officials say undermines the unity of Bosnia by ignoring the decisions of the country\u2019s constitutional court.
\nThe Bosnian Serb parliament has passed the law to not recognize or implement any decisions by Bosnia\u2019s multi-ethnic Constitutional Court, which is seen as another of the leadership\u2019s attempts to separate from the fragile Bosnian federation.
\nThe Bosnian War started in 1992, pitting mostly Muslim Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats against each other. It ended with the U.S.-sponsored Dayton accords that created two regions, the Republika Srpska and the Bosniak-Croat Federation.
\n\u201cWhen the most powerful country in the world imposes sanctions against you, it is something that we should be worried about,\u201d Vucic said, adding that the \u201cinappropriate and underserved\u201d sanctions \u201cproduce wrong effects.\u201d
\nThe U.S. recently also imposed sanctions on the pro-Russian head of Serbia\u2019s security agency, Aleksandar Vulin, accusing him of involvement in illegal arms shipments, drug trafficking and misuse of public office.
\nThere are widespread fears that Serbia, an ally of Russia, could inflame tensions in the Balkans to divert at least some of the world attention from the war in Ukraine.
\nSerbian populist leader Vucic on Friday attended in the Bosnian Serb entity commemorations for tens of thousands Serbs who in 1995 fled Croatia after a Croatian military offensive that marked the end of the war.
\nThe Croatian \u201cOperation Storm,\u201d which started on August 4, 1995, saw the Croatian Army liberate a large part of the Croatian territory that had been under the control of rebel Serbs since 1991. AP<\/p>\n
Croatian forces achieved their military goals in just three days, ousting the rebel Serbs\u2019 unrecognized statelet, the Republic of Serbian Krajina. The anniversary is marked each year in Croatia as a national triumph, with mainstream media echoing the celebratory patriotic theme.
\nAmong Serbs however, the narrative is very different. Operation Storm is seen by Serbs and their officials as a tragedy because it caused a huge exodus of Serb civilians from Croatia; several hundred Serbs were killed in the operation. AP<\/p>\n
\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 4 Aug: Serbia will ignore U.S. sanctions recently imposed on top Bosnian Serb officials for undermining a 1995 peace agreement that ended a war that left more than 100,000 dead and millions homeless, the Serbian president said Friday. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said that the sanctioned ethnic Serb officials from neighboring Bosnia […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-221756","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221756\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}