As part of its effort to punish those it believes are endangering the precarious stability of the Balkan nation, the United States imposed new sanctions on three citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina on Wednesday.
Osman Mehmedagic, the former head of the country’s intelligence security agency, was named for sanctions by the U.S. Treasury on Wednesday following allegations that he had improperly used a state-owned telecommunications company to gather cell phone data on politicians in Bosnia and Herzegovina who were not members of his Party of Democratic Action.
The 60-year-old is also charged with ordering a member of the Republika Srpska entity opposition party to be watched, and according to American officials, there is credible evidence that he has worked with criminal organizations to further his own and the interests of his SDA political party.
Asset freezes were also imposed on Wednesday against Dragan Stankovic, the director of the Republika Srpska Administration for Geodetic and Property Affairs.
According to U.S. officials, the 38-year-old is accountable for attempting to usurp control over state property in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the name of Republika Srpska by passing legislation that defies court rulings, the nation’s Constitution, and a ban on the sale of state property.
The third person on the list was Edin Gacanin, who Blinken called “one of the most infamous drug traffickers in the world.””In addition to narcotics trafficking efforts across multiple countries, Gacanin’s cartel is involved in money laundering and is connected to the Kinahan Organized Crime Group, which was previously designated by the Treasury for its role as a significant transnational criminal organization,” Blinken said.
The effort comes as the Biden administration continues to put pressure on those it says threaten the hard-won peace in the country that was devastated by war in the early 1990s, and which only ended with the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995.
Blinken has said the country faces its greatest political crisis since the war as leadership within Republika Srpska, one of two entities that with the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina make up the Balkan state, pursue secessionist actions, specifically by attempting to seize assets of the state and give them to their entity government.
