Hungary’s Orban Courts Bosnia Serb Leader, Warns of ‘Meddling’

Misha Savic and Andras Gergely
·2 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- Viktor Orban chided Western powers for “meddling” in the affairs of Bosnia-Herzegovina as the Hungarian prime minister received an award from a Russia-friendly Serb leader who has called for seceding from the Balkan nation.

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Orban’s broadside, which was largely aimed at the High Representative, Christian Schmidt, comes two weeks after European Union leaders agreed to open membership talks with Bosnia.

The Hungarian leader, who takes over the EU’s rotating presidency in July, said he backs the war-scarred nation’s EU ambitions, as long as it maintains the status quo since the Bosnian War ended in 1995 — ethnically divided between a Muslim-Croat federation and Serb-dominated Republika Srpska.

“Bosnia-Herzegovina is a decentralized country — that’s its structure — and it cannot be centralized against the will of the entities,” Orban told reporters in Banja Luka on Friday after meeting with Serb leader Milorad Dodik.

In contrast with EU leaders who have condemned Dodik’s separatist rhetoric as a threat to Bosnian unity, Orban has courted the Bosnian Serb leader, who has maintained his ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Dodik, who has defied Western efforts to streamline the country’s complex administration, has said the Serb entity will split off if Schmidt, a German conservative, proceeds with plans to give more authority to Bosnia’s central bodies. The Serb leader, under US and UK sanctions, said he backs the EU bid, “but we don’t want to move toward the EU if we lose our autonomy.”

‘Between Greece and Hungary’

Schmidt has had an open feud with Dodik, once calling him a “puppet on the string” of Putin. Last month, he introduced technical changes to Bosnia’s election law, a move that drew criticism from Bosnian officials skeptical of central authority.

Orban, who received a medal from Dodik, echoed the criticism of the top envoy — a position created by the Dayton Treaty that ended the bloody three-year war that tore Bosnia apart along ethnic lines.

“Foreigners meddle in the internal affairs” of Bosnia, he said, without naming Schmidt.

Still, Orban, who met earlier with Borjana Kristo, an ethnic Croat who leads Bosnia’s central government in Sarajevo, called for Western Balkan nations, most of which were involved in wars in the 1990s after the collapse of Yugoslavia, to join the 27-member bloc.

“The area between Greece and Hungary is not integrated into the European Union — and that is our task,” Orban said.

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