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Members of the police forces of Republic of Srpska
Members of the police forces of Republic of Srpska stand guard moments before a parade in 2018. Photograph: Amel Emric/AP
Members of the police forces of Republic of Srpska stand guard moments before a parade in 2018. Photograph: Amel Emric/AP

Arms shipment to Bosnian Serbs stokes EU fears

This article is more than 6 years old

Purchase of 2,500 automatic rifles raises concerns about Russia’s influence in region

The purchase of thousands of new guns by the Bosnian Serb police has raised concerns over the intentions of the separatist-led regional government and deepening Russian influence in a divided and economically depressed nation.

A shipment of 2,500 automatic rifles from Serbia is due to arrive in the Serb-run half of Bosnia in March, weeks before the scheduled opening of a new training centre where Russian advisers have been expected to play a role under an agreement signed more than two years ago.

The Bosnian Serb authorities have defended the arms purchase as necessary for self-defence against potential terrorist attacks. In a statement they stressed that their police trained extensively with US forces, and not with Russian police, and denied plans to bring Russian trainers to Bosnia.

The weapons are arriving at a time when Bosnia’s long-term stability is in doubt. The Dayton peace agreement ended the Bosnian conflict just over 22 years ago, dividing the country into two semi-autonomous parts: the Republika Srpska (RS) and a Muslim-Croat federation. The deal stopped the killing but created a system that rewarded ethnically based politics. Nationalist parties have a tight grip on power in their separate fiefdoms, corruption is rife, and the country has the highest official rate of youth unemployment in the world.

Earlier this month, the European commission unveiled a new strategy for the region, offering a “merit-based” path to EU membership, but left it unclear how Bosnia can overcome its deep structural problems.

Serb civil society activists, the central Bosnian government in Sarajevo and western diplomats believe that a new heavily armed police unit will be used by the Bosnian Serb separatist leader, Milorad Dodik, to entrench his position and intimidate opponents ahead of elections in October.

In the longer term they fear that the force could be used to further Dodik’s aims of independence, at the risk of a new war in the region.

Russia, which sees Dodik as a bulwark against Bosnian membership of Nato, has shown strong backing for the Serb separatist, who has met Vladimir Putin at least six times since 2014.

On Monday, Dodik confirmed the arms purchase, which was first reported by the Sarajevo-based news site Žurnal, and he said he would take further steps to arm the police for “the fight against terrorism”. “It is an entirely legitimate action and we have nothing to hide,” Dodik said. “For 20 years we didn’t have the right to equip the police, now we have decided to do it.”

The international community’s high representative in Bosnia, Valentin Inzko, expressed concern about the shipment. “I would like the country to have as few weapons as possible. If one side gets these types of weapons then the other side will want them too,” he said.

Dodik has cultivated relations with the Night Wolves, a Russian motorcycle club closely tied to Putin, which is under US sanctions for its paramilitary role in the Ukraine conflict.

At the same time, Russian-trained members of a paramilitary group Serbian Honour appeared on the streets of Banja Luka.

Members of the paramilitary group Serbian Honour pose in Banja Luka. Photograph: Handout

“It is an organisation of angry muscle-men that the government is using to threaten and intimidate its own people,” said Aleksandar Trifunović, a Bosnian Serb journalist. “However, this time they go beyond the usual show. This time it feels dangerous.”

The RS ministry of the interior said in a written response to questions from the Guardian that its police had “never conducted any type of training with the Russian police authorities neither in Russia nor in [Republika Srpska], including special forces”.

The statement said that a new $4m (£2.8m) counter-terrorism training centre due to open in April at the site of a former army barracks at Zalužani outside Banja Luka was being built with RS resources and had been visited by US embassy staff as well as members of the US armed forces.

“No Russian delegation ever came to visit the centre,” the statement said. It defended the arms purchases, saying the current police weapons were more than 20 years old and that the RS police were no longer subject to limits on the number of long-barrelled weapons that were imposed in the wake of the conflict of the 1990s.

It argued a well-equipped police counter-terrorist force was necessary, pointing to a 2015 attack on a RS police station in Zvornik by a 24-year-old returned Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) refugee. The attacker, Nerdin Ibrić, killed a Serb police officer and wounded two more before being shot dead. But his motives were unclear. Ibrić’s father was killed by Serb police in the first days of ethnic cleansing that began the war in 1992. But because he reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” it was deemed to be a terrorist attack.

In 2015, the RS interior minister, Dragan Lukač, signed a cooperation agreement with Moscow that envisaged Russian specialists providing counter-terrorist training in RS, but an interior ministry spokeswoman, Tatjana Telić, said there are currently no plans to bring Russia trainers to Bosnia.

“The Zaluzani centre will be open for all the partners who are sincere, with good intensions and professional skills. We have not any concrete future arrangements with Russian trainers,” she said.

A Russian-run “humanitarian centre” in Nis in Serbia is suspected by US authorities of providing a hub for Russian intelligence operations, such as an attempted coup in Montenegro in October 2016.

A western diplomat in Bosnia said there was “no hard evidence” so far that Russians were establishing a similar hub in Bosnia. “But we’re watching closely,” the diplomat added.

Kurt Bassuener, a Bosnia expert at the Democratisation Policy Council, said that by drawing down a stabilisation force to just 600 troops and giving up on a postwar initiative to integrate Bosnia’s divided police forces, the EU had left a vacuum that Russia is likely to fill. “As long as the barriers to entry are non-existent, we are leaving the barn door open,” Bassuener said. “It’s a screaming policy failure we haven’t paid for yet.”

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