BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AFP)--Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik warned Tuesday that Bosnia could break apart if Muslim leaders questioned the existence of his entity, a local weekly reported. 

"Republika Srpska (or RS) is being challenged by the Muslim political elite," Dodik told the Fokus weekly. 

"We are facing on daily basis attacks by officials of Bosnia's Islamic religious community and their conception on how to annul RS." 

The Dayton peace accords, which ended the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, divided the erstwhile Yugoslav republic into two entities which make up Bosnia - the Serbs' Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation. 

Dodik is the prime minister of Republika Srpska. 

"Many in the former Yugoslavia wanted the country to (continue existing) but it broke apart since some were belittling others," Dodik said. 

In the early 1990s, four of the former Yugoslavia's six republics - Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia and Slovenia - proclaimed independence leaving Serbia and Montenegro together until 2006. 

The 1991 proclamation of independence by Croatia and a year later by Bosnia, opposed by ethnic Serbs, were followed by wars which claimed some 20,000 and 100,000 lives respectively. 

"We do not want any imposed project" regarding Bosnia, Dodik said, stressing that Serbs backed the Dayton peace accords which "clearly made a balance." 

"Such a Bosnia-Herzegovina can function." 

Bosnia's two halves share weak central institutions while each has its own government and police. 

Serbs strongly oppose any strengthening of central institutions, sought by the international community to make the country more functional, at the expense of their entity's autonomy.