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A bipartisan group of senior lawmakers is again calling on the Trump administration to impose sanctions on Bosnian Serb officials after Republika Srpska authorities interrogated the authors of a recent report on genocide denial.
“We are deeply concerned by reports that current and former employees and associates of the Srebrenica Memorial Center have been summoned for questioning,” Senate Foreign Relations ranking member Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker, R-Miss., Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and ranking member Dick Durbin, D-Ill., plus Reps. Bill Keating, D-Mass., and Mike Turner, R-Ohio, said in a statement shared first with Semafor.
They urged the Trump administration to comply with this year’s annual defense legislation, which required officials to impose sanctions on anyone the president determines “threaten[s] the security, stability or territorial integrity of any areas of state in the Western Balkans.”
The White House and State Department did not respond to requests for comment.
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It’s not the first time Congress has invoked the provision, which took effect in March. Many of the same lawmakers sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier this year calling on them to impose sanctions on former Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik, whose continued calls for Bosnian Serbs to secede have stirred fears of a civil war like the one that killed more than 100,000 people three decades ago.
US officials last year lifted sanctions on Dodik, who was recently removed from office for violating Bosnia and Herzegovina’s peace accords, before welcoming him to Washington in February.
Republika Srpska has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying the second Trump administration, which Dodik has said “encourages us to say Republican Srpska First.”
“You’ve got a situation where an entity, in whose name genocide was committed, has a financial and political stake in being very close to this administration — and that I suspect is behind the administration being reluctant to support any statement that reminds people of the violence that was part of the war and in particular the genocide that happened around Srebrenica,” said Jim O’Brien, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs under former President Joe Biden, who’s written about the Trump administration’s Balkans policy.
Officials separately remain deadlocked over who should succeed the United Nations’ high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina after the US insisted he resign earlier this year. Some posit the overarching uncertainty could jeopardize the Trump administration’s unrelated efforts to secure a $1 billion pipeline project for a US company with ties to the president.