2016-09-26 18:30:00

Prosecutor furious as Bosnian Serbs approve 'Statehood Day' in banned vote


(Vatican Radio)  The state prosecutor of Bosnia-Herzegovina says he has opened an investigation into a Bosnian Serb referendum that was held on Sunday in defiance of the country's highest court. The announcement came after official results showed that about 99.8 percent of Bosnian Serb voters are in favor of keeping a disputed holiday that the Constitutional Court had said discriminates against non-Serbs.

Listen to Stefan Bos' report:

Bosnia's chief prosecutor Goran Salihovic expressed concern that the Serb region of his ethnically divided nation organized a referendum on whether to keep January 9 as a national holiday.

It commemorates the day in 1992 when Bosnian Serbs declared the creation of their own state, now known as Republika Srpska, during the Bosnian war of the 1990s.

As expected, Bosnian Serbs voted overwhelmingly to maintain national holiday in Republica Srpska, in defiance of Bosnia's highest court.

Referendum organizers said that preliminary results showed that 99.8 percent of voters in Republika Srpska were in favor of the annual holiday and that turnout was nearly 56 percent.

Wild celebrations

That prompted celebrations among supporters of the vote. The Bosnian Serb republic's nationalist President Milorad Dodik was welcomed as a hero.

He made clear in his speech that the vote to maintain Statehood Day would go down in history as the "day of Serb determination" and added that he was proud of the people of Republika Srpska, of all those who came out and voted. 

Dodik spoke in Pale, the town near Sarajevo, which was the headquarters of Bosnian Serb wartime President Radovan Karadzic, convicted of genocide in the Bosnian war.

However non-Serbs living in Republika Srpska mostly boycotted the vote.

The Constitutional Court had banned the referendum, which was organized by the region's local government. It said the annual commemoration discriminates against non-Serb, including Muslims in the area.

Muslims remember

Many Muslims and other non-Serbs were expelled from the Serb region.

And some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in 1995 when Bosnian Serb forces overran the Bosnian town of Srebrenica.

The West is also considering sanctions against Republika Srpska and its leaders. However Russia, a traditional ally of Serbs, has expressed support for the referendum calling it an act of democracy.

Balkan observers see it as a dress rehearsal for an attempt to secede from Bosnia, which was divided after the war between the Serb-run region and the Bosniak-Croat Federation.








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