By Ben Gerstein

Published on April 21, 2026

A Russian-backed Bosnian Serb separatist leader ousted from office in Bosnia last year for defying the country’s international overseer has nevertheless extended his hostile campaign against Bosnia’s Muslim community, increasingly in league with far-right figures across Europe and in the United States. His rapidly escalating rhetoric has so alarmed leaders of the Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina that they issued a statement last month condemning the proliferation of hate speech and inflammatory narratives about Bosnia’s Muslim community, also known as Bosniaks.

The Islamic Community’s statement was sparked by the recent deployment of aggressively anti-Muslim language by Milorad Dodik, the ex-President of Republika Srpska, the majority-Serb entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and other Bosnian Serb leaders in remarks to audiences in Israel and the United States. The Islamic Community’s response compared the heightened rhetoric to the hate speech and ethnically charged propaganda that inflamed tensions in the runup to the wars amid the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Again now, Dodik and his fellow Bosnian Serb leaders appear to be wielding Islamophobic arguments, this time to gain support for their ethno-nationalist project of independence for Republika Srpska. In an era of cooperation among international far-right actors, these arguments have purchase at high levels of government and across meaningful swaths of the Western public.

Dodik is well-known for his commitment to denying the genocide in Srebrenica, his Islamophobic and secessionist attitudes, racist remarks towards officials of other governments, and his repetitive undermining of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s fragile post-war legal and constitutional structure. An ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Dodik has repeatedly traveled to Moscow since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He also has partnered with Russia to undermine memorialization and substantive justice for victims of the war in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995.

His actions had long led to sanctions against him by the European Union and the United States, until the Trump administration lifted the penalties against him in October, after an extensive lobbying campaign and ostensibly as part of a deal to persuade him to accept a court’s ruling that he should be removed from office, which he had initially rejected. He remains under European sanctions, but he also still serves as the head of his political party in Republika Srpska and essentially continues to marshal power through proxies.

The Trope of Civilizational Struggle

In February visits to Jerusalem and then Washington D.C. — alongside the Serb member of the tripartite Bosnian state Presidency, Željka Cvijanović, and Acting President of Republika Srpska Ana Trišić Babić — Dodik warned of a civilizational struggle between the “Judeo-Christian” world and Islam, and portrayed Republika Srpska as squarely on the frontier against Muslim influence. For example, reflecting on his late-February trip to Jerusalem, Dodik declared that “Israel and [Republika Srpska] share an existential threat posed to us by radical Islam and the policies stemming from it.” And in remarks after Dodik’s trip to the United States, Serbian President and Dodik ally Aleksandar Vučić credited Dodik’s newfound closeness with the United States to a shared interest in “protecting Christianity and preserving Christian values.”

Further, in Jerusalem, Dodik argued that “liberal elites” are promoting the immigration of “people of the Islamic faith who bring with them deeply rooted and entrenched antisemitism.” This echoes some tenets of the far-right “Great Replacement Theory,” specifically its suggestion that the mass immigration of Muslims from the Arab world will undermine order and promote Islamic law in Europe and the United States. And in his visit to Washington, alongside Trump ally and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who had helped lobby for lifting U.S. sanctions on him, Dodik met with Republican members of Congress, reportedly including House Speaker Mike Johnson, and with officials of the Trump administration, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Dodik reported that he and Hegseth discussed the “defense of Christian values.”

Concerningly, the meetings in Israel and the United States may have had the desired effect among right-leaning publics in both contexts. A Washington Times opinion piece echoed much of Dodik’s rhetoric and called on the United States to recognize an independent Republika Srpska. The groundwork for such appeals, and specifically for anti-Bosnian Muslim rhetoric in the United States, has also been laid in the past year by others in Washington, including some at the Heritage Foundation, which hosted Project 2025. Additionally, a recent article in the Jewish News Syndicate news agency warned that Bosnia has “drifted” into extremism despite it being thought of “as a model moderate Muslim state.” In this piece, Bosniak solidarity with Palestinians was deployed as evidence of Bosnian society’s alleged radicalization.

In this fragile moment, Washington D.C.-based Serbian journalist Jovana Djurovic also aptly notes that the relationship between Bosnian Serbs and the West is increasingly being shaped by “an increasingly overt strain of Islamophobia.” Dodik’s statements against the Muslim community in Bosnia are indistinguishable from those of many far-right agitators and violent extremists the world over. Just last month, Dodik used the incredibly derogatory slur “balijas” to describe Bosnian Muslims, and claimed that “Muslims… are our enemy.” He once insultingly called the Muslim call to prayer “howling,” and demanded Bosnian Muslims convert to the Serbian Orthodox faith in the interests of national harmony. In late 2025, Dodik charged that Bosniaks are “amoebas that multiply and spread uncontrollably,” and years ago described them as “genetic liars.”

Common Nationalist Narratives

Further, as Columbia University’s Teachers College Professor and Bosnian War survivor Amra Sabic-El-Rayess presciently described in 2020, “American white supremacists flock to the Serb and Croat nationalist narratives premised on a long-held fear of Muslims.” And concerningly, scholars have linked past and present anti-Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) rhetoric to attacks on Muslim communities across the world, including the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand and 2011 neo-Nazi attacks in Norway.

The roots of this appeal to the West on the basis of Islamophobia can be traced to the bloody dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. University of Sarajevo Dean of the Faculty of Political Sciences Sead Turčalo observes that Dodik’s racialized dehumanization of Bosnian Muslims draws on the ideological foundations that inspired the Srebrenica Genocide in 1995 during the Bosnian War. Slobodan Milošević, the nationalist president of Serbia during the war, drew on the ostensible need to protect European Christianity from Islam in justifying aggressive and exterminatory military action in neighboring Bosnia. The memory of Ottoman rule also functioned as a means to demonize Muslims, treat them as an extension of Turkish rule, and assign them culpability for historical atrocities central to Serbian mythology.

Historical revision thus is another component of this anti-Muslim appeal. Beyond explicit Islamophobia, Dodik and others have abused the memory of the Holocaust in service of this nationalist campaign. During both visits to Jerusalem and Washington, D.C., Dodik accused Bosniaks of collaborating with Nazis and operating concentration camps during World War II. While some members of all ethnic groups in former Yugoslavia allied themselves with Nazis, the claim of widespread Bosnian Muslim participation in the genocide of Jews and Slavs during the Second World War is widely debunked. Bosnian Muslim leadership has also offered several public apologies for any complicity in fascist attacks on the state’s Jewish community during the Holocaust. Alas, this revisionism is not novel for Dodik. Repeatedly, he has deployed the Holocaust as a means to deny the genocide in Bosnia and enlisted Holocaust scholars to do so.

Dodik has long been courting those seeking to uplift similar movements across Europe. Especially in this environment, it is imperative that Dodik’s appeal is loudly and concertedly denounced for what it is at its core: an attempt to mobilize right-wing actors in favor of Bosnian Serb secessionism by appealing to anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant biases. Should such an appeal succeed, it could lead to the destabilization of Bosnia and Herzegovina, increased denial of the genocide in Bosnia and anti-Muslim hate speech, and the potential return of armed conflict in the Balkans.

FEATURED IMAGE: The president of the majority-Bosnian Serb entity of Bosnia, Milorad Dodik, shows documents during a press conference in which he denied that the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of thousands of Muslim men and boys was a “genocide,” ahead of a U.N. vote on May 23, 2024, on whether to hold an annual international commemoration of the well-documented atrocity. The U.N. voted to approve the commemoration. (Photo by ELVIS BARUKCIC/AFP via Getty Images)

source https://www.justsecurity.org/136681/bosnia-serb-secession-islamophobia/