Bosnia and Herzegovina's defence minister, Zukan Helez, has asked the international community to withdraw its signature from the existence of Republika Srpska. With that, he claims, the "genocidal para-state creation" would fall - and then, as he put it, "we know what we have to do".

That last sentence is the whole story. Not the argument, not the law, but what was left unsaid at the end. A defence minister in a country whose statehood rests on a single peace agreement from 1995 is openly hinting at what would follow if that agreement were revoked from outside.

The trigger is the funeral of General Ratko Mladić, held on 7 September with military honours and, according to sources, more than 150,000 people present. That figure alone says a great deal about where the region stands thirty years on.

From Sarajevo, an initiative to over 800 addresses

In parallel, fourteen members of the House of Representatives of Bosnia's Parliamentary Assembly sent an initiative to over eight hundred addresses in Europe, the US and the United Kingdom - calling for urgent review and temporary suspension of the Agreement on Special and Parallel Relations between Serbia and Republika Srpska.

The initiative states that this is not a reaction to a single event but to a continuity of policy, summed up in the declaration from the so-called All-Serb Assembly in Belgrade - including the denial of the Srebrenica genocide and the contesting of Bosnia's institutions.

Eight hundred addresses. That is diplomacy on the principle of "let somebody hear". The question is whether anyone in Brussels or Washington reads it at all, or whether the letter ends up where all Balkan letters end up - in a drawer marked "complicated".

The response: louder still

Helez was answered by the Serb member of Bosnia's Presidency, Željka Cvijanović, in language not a shade softer. "He would go off to jihad, would he? He would pack us into dungeons, he would put us in chains," she said, invoking the 1990s.

So: a defence minister on one side calls for abolishing the entity. A member of the Presidency on the other answers with images from the war. The two of them sit in institutions of the same state, paid by the same taxpayers.

This is a scene the Balkans know by heart: the rhetoric heats up in September, cools around New Year, and nobody is ever held to account for a single word spoken. The question that remains is a different one - how many times can the same peace agreement be attacked from both sides before somebody outside decides it is no longer worth defending?