Visit to Sarajevo comes after Bosnian Serb leaders bar federal judicial authorities and police from Republika Srpska.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has pledged the military alliance’s “unwavering” support for Bosnia and Herzegovina’s federal government after a series of separatist moves from Bosnian Serb leaders.
Rutte spoke in Sarajevo on Monday after meeting the three members of Bosnia’s multiethnic presidency shortly after Bosnian Serb lawmakers passed legislation barring federal judicial authorities and police from operating in the autonomous territory of Republika Srpska.
The NATO chief said any actions that undermine the Dayton Agreement, which ended the country’s 1992-1995 war, were “unacceptable”. He warned that “inflammatory rhetoric and actions” posed a direct threat to Bosnia’s “stability and security”.
Since the end of the Bosnian War, the country has consisted of two autonomous regions – Republika Srpska and a Bosniak-Croat federation, which are linked by a weak central government.
Bosnian officials said the Republika Srpska laws violate the peace agreement, which binds the two regions under joint institutions, including the army, top courts and tax authorities.
After meeting Rutte, Zeljka Cvijanovic, the Serb member of Bosnia’s presidency, said it was wrong to “put the blame on one side only”.
But Denis Becirovic, the Bosniak member of the presidency, described the Serb moves as a “brutal attack on the constitutional order”.
“Destabilisation of this part of Europe would only benefit Moscow,” Becirovic said.
“You have got to solve this, the three of you,” Rutte said in remarks aimed at the members of the presidency.
Reporting from Sarajevo, Al Jazeera’s Jonah Hull said: “It is a tense and quite possibly dangerous moment in which Mark Rutte makes his first visit to Bosnia as the new secretary-general of NATO at a time when Bosnia’s joint power-sharing structures and institutions are facing an unprecedented challenge from within.”
Hard-won peace ‘jeopardised’
The Bosnian Serb laws were passed after a state court sentenced Milorad Dodik, the territory’s pro-Russia president, to a year in prison and a six-year ban from state office for defying Christian Schmidt, the international high representative charged with overseeing Bosnia’s peace accords.
Dodik, who has faced United States and British sanctions for his separatist actions, has rejected his court sentence, calling it anti-Serb.
The situation has sparked fears of incidents between Bosnian- and Serb-dominated police similar to ones at the start of the war in the 1990s when the country’s Serbs rebelled against Bosnian independence from the former Yugoslavia and moved to form a mini-state.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia found that more than 100,000 people were killed in the Bosnian War – at least 70 percent of them Bosniak Muslims, in what is regarded as the only genocide in Europe since World War II. More than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, one of the worst mass killings of the war.
Bosnia has struggled to move forwards with a heavily divided society and a stagnant economy. Bosniak politicians often accuse the Republika Srpska of preventing the country from advancing.
Still, peace has held since the Dayton Agreement, and Rutte said on Monday that NATO would “not allow hard-won peace to be jeopardised”.
“Three decades after the Dayton Peace Agreement, I can tell you: NATO remains firmly committed to the stability of this region and to the security of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” he said.
The European peacekeeping force in Bosnia has said it is raising the number of its soldiers in response to the tensions.