Saturday, November 27, 1999

B2-92: Mr Dodik, are you a only a powerful man, or are you both powerful and dangerous?

Dodik: Dangerous? That depends on for whom. And I certainly don't feel powerful, even though I'm prime minister of the Republic of Srpska, which should entail some power as a matter of course. If we take into account what's been done so far, then we might come to the conclusion that I do have certain instruments of power at my disposal, but I endeavour to use that power exclusively to secure the development and stability of the Republic of Srpska.

B2-92: For whom are you dangerous?

Dodik: I'm dangerous for political strategies which are basically decadent and retrograde. These policies arouse an internal urge and a desire to settle accounts and an attempt to eliminate them from the political scene. In that sense I'm probably dangerous for the Serbian Radical Party, the Serbian Democratic Party and, more recently, for the Milosevic regime and some other political options as well.

B2-92: When you say "eliminate", do you refer to any means at your disposal, or only the political ones?

Dodik: Exclusively the political ones.

B2-92: I have to ask you this question: you have recently been accused of transferring huge amounts of counterfeit banknotes into Serbia with the intention of destabilising the regime. Also the Yugoslav authorities say they have apprehended people for this who claim to be members of the Republic of Srpska Ministry of the Interior.

Dodik: I absolutely deny all these charges against me. The fact is that there is absolutely no information whatsoever about this case these days, as if nothing had ever happened, despite the efforts of our Interior Ministry to contact its Serbian counterpart to get details about the people accused of this shows how serious such claims are. They wouldn't even talk about it. We've received no official information about this affair.

 B2-92: You mean that no one gave you any information at all?

Dodik: No one would tell us anything about it. The Republic of Srpksa Information Minister tried very hard to obtain information but to no avail, which proved that this alleged affair was actually contrived to serve the needs of the regime's domestic policy in Serbia. The story about counterfeit dinars is absolutely untrue: it is completely void of any logic; it can't possibly be true. It would not be feasible to destabilise the Serbian economic and monetary system with five or six hundred thousand dinars which are worth only about twenty or thousand Deutsche Marks on the black market.

B2-92: So they caught you with that money...

Dodik: Of course they couldn't have caught me. I didn't do anything of the sort. One of the policemen whom the Serbian authorities released from prison gave us his account of the affair and we know that. An acquaintance of his appeared at the border crossing in the Republic of Srpska and asked him to take him across the border in his car. Our customs officer called his Serbian counterpart on the other side and asked him to allow our policeman to cross into Serbia, as they knew each other. As soon as he crossed the border there were suddenly cameras and police and then the media circus began in Serbia. There was no evidence that these dinars were counterfeit. Payment operations between the Republic of Srpska and Serbia are blocked now, so some people use cash to pay for goods and services. It appears that those people attempted to pay their accounts, perhaps using dinars printed at Topcider. These are being transferred regularly to the Republic of Srpska and we know exactly how many dinars flow into the Republic each day. It's not logical because if someone nowadays tried to counterfeit currency, they certainly wouldn't choose dinars which are worthless anyway; the regime makes counterfeit dinars, just as it has made counterfeit Serbian history and counterfeit Serbia reality over the past decade. If I were a counterfeiter I would make US dollars or Deutsche Marks. You know, if you were to print half a million Marks or US dollars you would have quite a large amount of money, but counterfeiting half a million dinars means absolutely nothing.

B2-92: You said you didn't have good enough printing equipment.

Dodik: That's right, we don't have any equipment for that. There's no press in the Republic of Srpska which could print those banknotes, except in the make-believe world of Mr Matic and the other people responsible for fabricating such affairs. A man who is inclined to invent stories about assassinations, for instance, will also tend to wake up in the morning thinking that other people are devising the same schemes to deceive him. This sort of thing doesn't bother me at all. I don't even think about them as I wasn't associating with people who were capable of any wrongdoing during the war - from the beginning I was in the opposition bloc, claiming that this was not a reflection of the true character of Serbian people. Obviously those who promoted such methods of political struggle at the time should fear such things because of their restless dreams. This is why these stories were actually invented. I've heard the latest news about the alleged assassination plot against Milosevic. Goran Matic is apparently in charge of making such spectacular affairs public. You know, the greater the lie, the greater the chance that the public will actually swallow it and they know that perfectly well. They believe that the only thing they need to do is to offer an explanation for the suffering and hardship of the Serbian people and of course someone else, not the regime itself, is always to blame for the current state of affairs.

B2-92: This time five specific people have been named. They are reportedly members of the Tenth Sabotage Brigade, or some such organisation from the Republic of Srpska. Have you ever heard of such a brigade?

Dodik: No, I've never heard of it. In my opinion this was used to implicate the Republic of Srpska so that the public would think along the line that if such things were to take place in the Serbian entity, if they'd tried to do that in the Republic of Srpska, it's quite natural they would do something similar in Serbia. However this kind of scheme will probably soon no longer possible in these parts. These are the last-ditch attempts of the Milosevic regime to explain its paranoia to the people.

B2-92: Why was Mr Radisic visiting Mr Milosevic at a time when the official view of the ruling coalition was that this would be counterproductive. It was said that the whole of the Republic of Srpska was waiting for Mr Radisic to return from Istanbul and offer some explanation. Did he offer one to you?

Dodik: As far as his visiting Milosevic was concerned, it was really counterproductive both for the Republic of Srpska and for Yugoslavia. Mr Radisic, as a member of the Presidency, objected to the official charges brought by Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993 against Yugoslavia for allegedly committing genocide and aggression in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In my opinion this should have been done much earlier, though we should ask ourselves why someone like Momcilo Krajisnik, allegedly a Serbian nationalist, didn't take advantage of the right to lodge this complaint while he was in that position. So Mr Radisic lodged the complaint and the legal procedure required a two-thirds majority in the Parliament to approve the motion. This is actually required by the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the time the issue was whether the Radicals, those ardent Serbian fighters, would return to the Parliament and vote for this motion to reject all charges against Yugoslavia. The Radicals wouldn't come and Mr Radisic said that he was trying to persuade them to come and therefore sought support for that from Milosevic. Even the mere necessity of asking Milosevic to intervene is harmful to the Republic of Srpska. I think that we should have assembled at the Parliament session and let the Radicals prove whether they are indeed in favour of dropping these accusations against Yugoslavia or not. Whether Milosevic intervened or not shouldn't have been an issue here at all.

B2-92: If both you and what you say are respected in the Republic of Srpska, why are you making so much fuss about the meetings in New York and Istanbul?

Dodik: I'm not the kind of man to hide behind other people who are explaining something in my name. I explained, before the arrival of Mr Radisic, that I'd participated in some of the talks in New York and that rumours which circulated here in the Republic of Srpska, even though the declaration hadn't been published at the time, were untrue, as was the rumour about the unified Bosnian army. Even when the content of the declaration had been made public, it didn't corroborate those stories. At the New York talks there had been some mention of the need to establish a military unit for UN peacekeeping operations which could be made up of troops from both the Republic of Srpska and the Federation, but this didn't mean we would have a unified army. Some strange things are happening here. It's rather odd that the people who have ridden on the wave of Serbian nationalism for ten years and were feverish opponents of anything coming from the Muslims now regularly use a Muslim daily - "Dnevni Avaz" - as the source of information for their political struggle without evening questioning the veracity of that information.

B2-92: The New York Declaration was welcomed most by the Americans and those who were striving to create a unified Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Declaration contained proposals for solutions to three important issues - a future unified army, border police and passports. Many saw it as a revision of the Dayton Agreement and claimed that you took part in this. Why do you say that this is not so when, apart from "Dnevni Avaz", your claims have also been denied by the Office of the High Representative?

Dodik: I said that was there for part of the meeting when there was no mention of a unified army or any similar issues. I don't know what the OHR might have said. As far as border police are concerned, Milosevic signed the Dayton Agreement as the representative of the Serbian people. At that time he recognised Bosnia and Herzegovina as an internationally recognised state within internationally recognised borders - the borders of the former Yugoslav Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As a man who became prime minister, I could do nothing but implement the Dayton Peace Accords. The myth about Milosevic, who from the very beginning was praised for having created the autonomous Republic of Srpska which, in his view, would soon become a member of the United Nations while Bosnia and Herzegovina was an imaginary creation, was generated at the time the Dayton Agreement was concluded. This myth has persisted all these years.

B2-92: And you claim that it's not true?

Dodik: It is absolutely untrue. This myth was intended to represent things which had been done wrongly in a positive light. This is typical of Milosevic and the political conglomerate in the Republic of Srpska which clings to his policy. If he signed the Dayton Agreement then, in my view, it should be respected. Milosevic obviously thinks he doesn't have to respect international agreements. If we take into account the way the SDS, completely under Milosevic's control, began to implement the Dayton Agreement then we begin to lose even the Dayton Agreement itself and our entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The new political bloc now in power thought that the Dayton Agreement should be implemented. The agreement contains the provision that Bosnia and Herzegovina is an internationally recognised state consisting of two entities - the Republic of Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation, so all foreign policy activities must be at the level of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This also applies to the border police. It's completely logical for the border to be monitored by the state agency at the level of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and this issue is on the agenda right now. We tried to protect the interests and rights of both the Republic of Srpska and the Serbian people within the framework of this solution, so we said that the border police in the Republic of Srpska must have at least two thirds of its members from the entity's majority ethnic group. Conversely, in those regions with a Croat majority two thirds of the border police should be Croat and so on. We also demanded that the staff of the border police offices reflect the Dayton Agreement's structure in Bosnia and Herzegovina. These talks have been going on for several months now. It's a painstaking process, but it certainly doesn't imply the loss of any functions of the Republic of Srpska - we can influence these things because joint state agencies are at issue here. Our minister, a Serb, Marko Asanin, will be in charge of the agency. So we haven't lost control, but some people will nevertheless use this for manipulation, claiming that Milosevic provided this or that, and now we're the ones to blame. No one can take this story seriously as it all begins with Seselj and his claims that the western border of Serbia should be along the Karlovac-Karlobag line and now there's no state of Serbia even in Kosovo, no Serbs in Croatia, and no Serbs in a sizeable portion of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

B2-92: Have you exerted any influence on the editorial policy of the independent daily "Nezavisne Novine" which, in your words, you founded together with Mr Kopanja who recently lost his legs in an assassination attempt?

Dodik: You should ask the staff of "Nezavisne Novine" that question. I can only tell you that I haven't tried to influence them in any way, although it is true that I gave them financial assistance in launching the newspaper and I'm happy about that, although what happened to Mr Kopanja is one of the most tragic events I know of recently.

B2-92: Do you consider this assassination attempt a kind of warning to yourself as well?

Dodik: You could say so, although this tragic incident has upset me deeply. I even felt partly responsible for what happened to Mr Kopanja - he wouldn't have been so seriously injured if we hadn't launched this newspaper. Well, this defeatism should eventually be discarded and we should go on because if you admit that you were wrong in this respect then you give legitimacy to such actions and to people who want to change society with bombs and assassinations.

B2-92: You could possibly prevent such things if the police were more efficient. They haven't made much progress in this case, particularly in the period immediately following the incident. As prime minister, do you have any pangs of conscience over that?

Dodik: Certainly I do, although there are some objective limitations in that respect. I don't want to seek excuses for the police - we inherited the police force, which was formerly part of the Republic of Srpska army and police. We have replaced some senior police officers and we are working at making the police more profession.. Unfortunately there are a large number of weapons we don't know about and many people who were trained to use explosives and military equipment during the war. I don't want to say this is normal, but it's impossible to protect every person in the Republic of Srpska, to be sure that something like the assassination attempt on Kopanja won't happen again. I know that the police tried to provide protection for Mr Kopanja, but he didn't think he was in any particular danger and didn't think he needed bodyguards. He enjoyed that kind of protection for some time, but there are various things involved here and I can't elaborate on this issue. It's my view, however, that Mr Kopanja will be able to identify and damage the people who crippled him through his future work as a journalist.

B2-92: Seselj says, threateningly, that you would be a welcome guest in Serbia. Are you afraid of him? Do you intend to come to Serbia at all?

Dodik: If I were afraid of them I wouldn't speak publicly against them. It's my view that these people are sinking slowly into a system of dictatorship which involves the liquidation of political opponents resulting in the paranoia and fear of various groups which allegedly want to organise assassinations. I declare publicly that I'm willing to come to Serbia and appear in court in any case which the Serbian authorities want to initiate against me for falsifying dinars or anything else. If there can be a television debate or a debate in a court of law then I'm prepared to come to Serbia immediately. So I don't want to say that I'm afraid of Seselj as I've opposed his policy from the very beginning. In my view he is the gravedigger of the Serbian people and he will demonstrate this one day to the Serbian nation. So here's my proposal: please, gentlemen, arrange for me to sit in the same television studio as Seselj and Milosevic and we'll present our various opinions and arguments about everything that has been done for the Serbian people.