The government of Bosnia's Serb-run entity on Thursday called a halt to all cooperation with the ethnically-divided country's central police force and justice authorities, in fury over raids by officers investigating war crimes.
Tensions have been rising for several months over Bosnian Serb authorities' threat to call a referendum on whether to give any recognition at all to the central judiciary, which they consider "illegal" and unfair toward Serbs.
Thursday's move came after inspectors raided a police station and the City Hall of the northwestern town of Novi Grad earlier in the day, looking for five Serbs suspected of war crimes, in an operation that outraged Bosnian Serb authorities.
"The government and all the institutions of the Republika Srpska (the RS, or Bosnian Serb entity) stop all cooperation with the State Court and the Prosecutor of Bosnia," Interior Minister Dragan Lukac told an extraordinary session of the RS parliament.
He added that cooperation would also be halted with SIPA, the central police force in charge of investigating war crimes committed during the 1992-1995 ethnic war in Bosnia which claimed 100,000 lives.
SIPA's raid on the police station and city hall in Novi Grad were "a very provocative and inappropriate gesture," he added.
"The government of Republika Srpska ordered the interior ministry to prevent any attempt to enter and search these institutions," Lukac said.
RS President Milorad Dodik supported the move to suspend cooperation with the central police and justice, saying of the raids: "Such circumstances could have even provoked an armed conflict."
He said violence had instead been avoided through Bosnian Serb authorities' decision to let the investigators carry out the raids, and then debate the issue in parliament.
Since the end of the war, Bosnia has been divided into two semi-independent entities -- the one run by Serbs, and a Muslim-Croat Federation.
The entities are linked by a loose central government. Both entities have a large degree of autonomy, including running their own police forces.
Serbs have been defying any attempt by Bosnian Muslims and the international community to strengthen the central government and its institutions at the cost of the entities' autonomy.