(ANSA-AFP) - BANJA LUKA, JAN 9 - Bosnian Serbs led by their
President Milorad Dodik will on Tuesday ignore global
condemnation and warnings to mark their entity's controversial
"national holiday", more than three decades after proclaiming a
"republic". Bosnian Serb political leaders, who were hostile to
Bosnia's independence from Yugoslavia as sought by Bosniaks and
Croats when the communist federation started to collapse in the
early 1990s, proclaimed their republic -- Republika Srpska -- on
January 9, 1992. Three months later an inter-ethnic war broke
out in Bosnia, claiming 100,000 lives. Since the 1992-1995 war,
Bosnia and Herzegovina has been split along ethnic lines into
two semi-independent entities -- the mostly-Orthodox Christian
Serbs' Republika Srpska (RS) and the Federation of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, made up of mostly-Muslim Bosniaks and
mostly-Catholic Croats. In 2015, Bosnia's constitutional court
ruled that the January 9 holiday discriminates against the
country's Bosniaks and Croats. (ANSA-AFP).
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