Bosnia's autonomous Serb region is set to defy its highest court with a referendum on a national holiday on Sunday that may stoke separatist sentiment lingering since the 1990s war.
The United States, which brokered Bosnia's 1995 peace treaty, and European Union fear the plebiscite could destabilise the region anew. But Russia, a traditional Serb ally, backs the vote and the Bosnian Serb leader headed to Moscow on Thursday for talks with President Vladimir Putin in a show of solidarity.
The referendum, on whether to mark Jan. 9 as "Statehood Day" in the Serb Republic part of Bosnia, will be the country's first since a 1992 plebiscite on secession from then Yugoslavia that ignited three years of ethnic war in which 100,000 were killed.
Speaking before his departure for Moscow, nationalist Bosnian Serb President Milorad Dodik said he did not expect Putin to try to talk him out of the vote, and that he would ask for help in training his region's police to fight terrorism.
Mladen Bosic, from the Serb Democrat Party, said bringing the US and Russia into the discussion was a sign of bad omen.
"With their political game they (Dodik and Izetbegovic) have created a dangerous situation and now we see the big players, the west and Russia, getting involved. Whenever we had big players interfering, people here were suffering, and that creates our concern," he said.
Jan. 9 was the day in 1992 when Bosnian Serb legislators declared the creation of an independent Serb Republic after Bosniaks and Croats voted for independence from Serbian-dominated federal Yugoslavia.
Many believe that by defying the court ruling, Dodik aims to highlight the weakness of post-war Bosnia's central authorities in Sarajevo and set the stage for a vote on secession.
"I don't know why they (politicians) keep creating these situations which lead to confrontations," Rade Ciric told Reuters in the streets of Pale.
"People here have suffered a lot and live hard. They are creating tensions that can lead to a new stupid war. And you know how many were killed in the last one, God forbid it happening to anyone," added Dejan Samardzija.
The court's rulings are formally binding, but more than 90 of them have been ignored by the autonomous regions - including a Bosniak-Croat Federation - that were devised by negotiators to cement peace and prevent the country's break-up.
The Bosnian Serbs' rejection of an independent, multi-ethnic Bosnia in 1992 triggered an avalanche of bloodshed in which Serbs and Croats carved ethnically pure statelets out of Bosnia with the backing of kin in neighbouring Serbia and Croatia.
It was Europe's bloodiest conflict since World War Two.
