Bosnian Serbs to mark controversial 'national day'

(ANSA-AFP) - BANJA LUKA, JAN 9 - Bosnian Serbs led by their President Milorad Dodik will on Tuesday ignore global condemnation and warnings to mark their entity's controversial "national holiday", more than three decades after proclaiming a "republic". Bosnian Serb political leaders, who were hostile to Bosnia's independence from Yugoslavia as sought by Bosniaks and Croats when the communist federation started to collapse in the early 1990s, proclaimed their republic -- Republika Srpska -- on January 9, 1992. Three months later an inter-ethnic war broke out in Bosnia, claiming 100,000 lives. Since the 1992-1995 war, Bosnia and Herzegovina has been split along ethnic lines into two semi-independent entities -- the mostly-Orthodox Christian Serbs' Republika Srpska (RS) and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, made up of mostly-Muslim Bosniaks and mostly-Catholic Croats. In 2015, Bosnia's constitutional court ruled that the January 9 holiday discriminates against the country's Bosniaks and Croats. (ANSA-AFP).