Amina Agovic-Argillander, Ph.D.

Let me double down on what I said before. This is who Milorad Dodik is. An unrepentant extremist. A genocide denier. A man who has spent years rehabilitating the perpetrators of genocide while systematically insulting and dehumanizing their victims. This is a man who claimed that empty coffins were being buried at the Srebrenica Memorial Center. Think about the sheer moral depravity of that accusation. Thousands of families spent decades searching for the remains of their murdered loved ones, often burying only a handful of bones recovered from mass graves. And Dodik chose to mock their grief and cast doubt on the very existence of their dead. He called the Srebrenica genocide a fabricated myth. He described Ratko Mladić, the man convicted of that genocide, as a legend and a national hero. He inaugurated a student dormitory named after Radovan Karadžić, another convicted genocidaire. He has publicly rejected the possibility of living in the same country with Bosniaks while continuing to deny the genocide committed against them. These are not isolated outbursts. They are not unfortunate remarks, political provocations, or examples of overheated Balkan rhetoric. They constitute a sustained political project: to rehabilitate the perpetrators, erase the crime, humiliate its survivors, and make the ideology that produced the genocide politically respectable again. Dodik knows what happened in Srebrenica. He once acknowledged it himself. His subsequent denial is not ignorance. It is a deliberate political choice. And every international official who treats him as an ordinary politician with whom one merely happens to disagree should be confronted with this record. There is nothing ordinary about a politician who glorifies convicted genocidaires and mocks the graves of their victims. Milorad Dodik is not misunderstood. He is not a moderate who occasionally goes too far. He is not someone whose extremism can be explained away as electoral rhetoric. He has told us, repeatedly and publicly, exactly who he is. The question is why so many people continue pretending otherwise.