The Bosnian Serbs vote on Sunday in a referendum over a disputed national holiday, defying Bosnia’s highest court and Western pressure to call off a process that risks stoking ethnic tensions in the divided Balkan country.
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Organisers in the autonomous Serb Republic part of Bosnia said that with 71 percent of the votes counted, 99.8 percent of voters had supported the January 9 “Statehood Day” holiday, with turnout possibly as high as 60 percent.
Preliminary results after 30.76 percent of the ballots were counted say 99.8 percent of the voters were in favor of the holiday.
Polls opened on Sunday morning in the disputed referendum in Republika Srpska on the entity’s national day despite objections from the European Union and the US. Pale was the headquarters of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, during the Bosnian war.
January 9 is the date when Bosnian Serbs declared independence from Bosnia in 1992, precipitating the country’s devastating war marked by mass killings and persecution of Bosniaks and Croats in the territory they earmarked to become exclusively Serb.
It marks the proclamation of a “Republic of Serb people” in Bosnia that took place three months before the inter-ethnic 1992-1995 war that claimed 100,000 lives.
The Constitutional Court, based in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, banned the referendum.
Bosnia’s Central Election Commission refused to hand over voter lists to Republika Srpska, forcing referendum officials to compose their own electoral roll with the help of the entity’s own institutions. “It’s a great day for our Republic and our people”, Mr Dodik said on Friday.
“There will be no war, nobody will destroy Republika Srpska”, Bakir Izetbegovic, the Bosniak chairman of the country´s three-man inter-ethnic presidency, said on Saturday.
The Russian ambassador to Bosnia disagrees however and supports the entity’s right to stage the vote.
“Now we know that the public has confirmed January 9 and we know that the public did not want to give up this date”, a defiant Dodik told a press conference in the RS parliament in Banja Luka, northern Bosnia. “We don’t dispute the right of the Muslim Bosniaks to mark their holidays but they can neither dispute this right to us”.
The referendum has rekindled worries about Bosnian stability.
Talk of a new conflict has increased tensions, prompting the Serb Republic police to raise the security level at the weekend. “Republika Srpska has nothing to fear”, he said. “What’s happening brings back memories of what happened in 1992”, when the Bosnian war began, said Nusreta Sivac, a Bosniak who was held in a Serb detention camp in the western town of Prijedor during the war.
Anecdotal evidence pointed to strong support from the Bosnian Serb public for the vote.
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But Bosnian Serb opposition representative Mladen Ivanic denounced the poll as “adventurism” and vowed not to participate.
