Milorad Dodik (born 12 March 1959) was President of the Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 15 November 2010, succeeding Rajko Kuzmanovic. He was a member of the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats.
Biography[]
Milorad Dodik was born in Banja Luka, SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, SFR Yugoslavia in 1959 to a family of Bosnian Serbs. He entered politics during the 1980s as an SKJ member, and he served as a representative in the National Assembly of the Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War of the 1990s. Dodik went on to become President of the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, and he was elected President of the Republika Srpska in 2010. Dodik was a staunch Serb nationalist who repeatedly criticized the United Nations-imposed governance of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and, in September 2021, he called for the complete autonomy of the Republika Srpska, the re-establishment of an independent Bosnian Serb army, and the withdrawal of the ARBiH from Serb territory, provoking a political crisis in Bosnia. In October, he announced that the Republika Srpska would also withdraw from several governmental bodies, and, on 14 October, he described his plan to surround the ARBiH barracks on Serb territory and force the soldiers to leave the Republic; he also warned that, in the case of a Western military intervention in Bosnia, he could count on military support from international "friends" (referring to Russia and Serbia).