Eurasia Press & News
The main Bosnian Serb party, the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, SNSD, has sounded a defiant note following its exclusion from the Socialist International.The Executive Secretary of the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, Rajko Vasic, led by the Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, said the party will not go into mourning following its exclusion from the Socialist International several days ago.Vasic said the party will not “veil itself in black”, as the decision merely marked the continuation of a policy of discrimination against Serbs that had gone on for the past two decades.
“We will not wear black because of that,” Vasic said. “We will go on with our political program of responding to all the needs of our citizens.”
He said that the SNSD had nurtured many other contacts in the world beyond the Socialist International which, he said, had evidently sided with Bosnia’s mainly Bosniak [Muslim] Social Democratic Party, SDP.
The SDP, meanwhile, said that excluding Dodik’s party reflected the fact that the SNSD had abandoned social democracy for ethnic nationalism and separatism.
“The denial of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its attempts to twist historical facts from the recent past about the [1995] Srebrenica genocide only hastened the process of the exclusion of Dodik’s SNSD from the Socialist International,” the SDP said.
It added that all the other member parties supported the decision “which illustrates the political and ideological turn of Dodik’s party, causing… it to be excluded from the world family of social democrats.”
