The Bosnian Serb leader accused of risking war by breaking up Bosnia-Herzegovina has likened himself to David Cameron and his efforts to renegotiate Britain’s EU membership terms before the Brexit referendum. Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of the tripartite presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina, said the country’s potential collapse and the exit of the Republika Srpska entity from it was only on the cards if he was rebuffed in his demand to take back control of tax administration, the judiciary and the army. Dodik’s comments in the Republika Srpska’s assembly, firing the starting shot of what he intends to be six months of negotiations with the Croat and Muslim Bosniak leadership over a new arrangement, came as local politicians backed a resolution under which the entity would unilaterally take back the powers if necessary. Dodik said he was willing to compromise on elements of his plans but that a new constitution would be put to a referendum and that the Republika Srpska would be pushed to “exit” if his main demands were not met. He dismissed criticism and said he was making efforts to avoid a dramatic break up. Dodik’s speech to the assembly, he said, had drawn on Cameron’s “Bloomberg speech” in 2013 in which the UK prime minister had set out demands for new terms of Britain’s membership with the EU. “In this speech, I replaced Great Britain [sic] with Republika Srpska, and Bosnia and Herzegovina with the European Union,” Dodik said. At the time, Cameron said that repatriating some powers away from the EU to Britain would lead to a new settlement that would help him win a 2017 EU referendum. Despite Dodik’s claims to be merely seeking to reverse the centralisation of powers in favour of the central Bosnian state, he faced stark criticism in the assembly even from fellow Serb nationalists about the manner in which he was pursuing his goals. Mirko Šarović, the leader of the Serb Democratic Party, the party founded by Radovan Karadžić, who is currently serving a 40-year sentence for genocide in Srebrenica, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, said Dodik posed a “direct threat to peace”. “The takeover of these competencies cannot be carried out without war”, Šarović said. The current constitution of Bosnia was established by the 1995 Dayton peace accord, which ended the bloody regional war that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. Bosnia-Herzegovina is made up of two entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, consisting predominantly of Bosniak Muslims and Croats, and the Serbian Republika Srpska. Bosnia’s three-member presidency is held by representatives of those three main ethnic groups. Under the so-called Bonn powers of 1997, substantial powers of lawmaking were also granted to the office of the high representative (OHR) in charge of implementing the deal. Dodik has claimed that powers have become increasingly centralised, and that the OHR plays an oversized and undemocratic role in Bosnian Serb affairs. “Let’s determine at this moment what Bosnia-Herzegovina needs and what it needs to stop doing,” he told assembly members. “Entities and their parliaments should have greater significance and role because they are a true source of democracy, legitimacy and responsibility in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bosnia-Herzegovina is moving in a direction we do not agree with. We do not allow interference in our jurisdiction.” Dodik has been banned from travelling to the US, or accessing assets under its jurisdiction since defying Bosnia’s constitutional court in 2017 by staging a referendum on celebrating Republika Srpska Day, marking the date in 1992 when Bosnian Serbs declared their own state in Bosnia. In an interview with The Guardian last month, he said he was not “indifferent” to threats of further sanctions from the US, the EU and European governments but added: “I was not elected to be a coward.” He had also claimed that a cut in funding from the EU would be made up by backing from China and Russia. Dodik visited Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin last week.