Rival Bosniak Councils Likely in Serbia’s Sandzak

Three months before a rerun of elections to a National Council for Serbia’s Bosniak [Muslim] community, fears are growing that the most likely result will be the emergence of two parallel councils, deepening divisions in the mainly Muslim Sandzak region.

The apparent winner of the last round of elections in June 2010, Mufti Muamer Zukorlic, has announced that his Bosniak Cultural Community will boycott the forthcoming election on the grounds that it won the last round.

Zukorlic enjoys provoking the authorities in Belgrade. But, according to most local experts, his announced boycott does not sound like a mere provocation, but is more like a firm decision, which could have serious consequences for the ethnically and politically divided region.

“We certainly won’t take part in those elections and we will be pointing out to people… that what these [fresh] elections actually mean is further violation of our electoral will and rights,” Zukorlic said in January in Sandzak’s main town, Novi Pazar.

Serbia’s Minister of Human and Minority Rights, Svetozar Ciplic, is sounding equally hard line.

In a recent interview with the Belgrade newspaper Vecernje novosti, Ciplic taunted Zukorlic, saying he was only threatening to boycott the elections because he feared “electoral defeat”.

All boycotts, the minister said, “have a clearly defined motive, and in this case the motive… is a well founded and palpable fear that in the new elections the Bosniak Cultural Community ticket won’t win nearly as many votes as it did in the elections last year.”

Ciplic called for the new elections for a National Council of Bosniaks to take place on April 17, following six months of impasse over the constitution of this body.

In the first elections to a Bosniak Council, on June 5, 2010, the mufti’s team scored a narrow victory.  Zukorlic’s Bosniak Cultural Community won 17 seats. Its rivals, the Bosniak Ticket, supported by Sulejman Ugljanin, won 13, and the Bosniak Renaissance, supported by Rasim Ljajic, won five.

After the elections, the Bosniak Cultural Community formed the National Council. But the other two tickets refused to recognise the result, saying Zukorlic had only obtained a majority through the support of two votes from the Bosniak Renaissance, which they disputed.

Moreover, the night before the council was constituted, the Ministry of Human and Minority Rights suddenly changed the rules for the constitution of the council, lifting the threshold from a simple majority to a two-thirds majority of those present.

Minister Ciplic told Vecernje novosti that new elections were needed because the mufti’s team had abused the system “out of political calculations aimed at achieving limited political gains,” adding: “I hope there won’t be any similar abuse this time”.

Serbia set up National Councils for ethnic minorities in 2009. A new law gave these bodies broad competences in the fields of education, culture, information and use of language and national symbols.

Elections to most other national councils in Serbia have been uncontroversial.

But in Sandzak the two sides have been at loggerheads since last June. Ciplic has dramatically accused the mufti of aiming to start “a fire that consumes all the citizens of Sandzak”.

For his part, Zukoric says new elections only represent Belgrade’s grim determination to “further obstruct the electoral will of the Bosniaks”.

At the helm of the present National Council formed by the Balkan Cultural Community is a close associate of the mufti’s, Mevlud Dudic, who says a fresh poll would be superfluous. “We are not interested in any new elections,” Dudic told Balkan Insight.

While the mufti’s supporters and Belgrade officials battle it out, local NGOs and representatives of the two other two tickets are split on whether new elections can do any good at this stage.

All that they agree on is that after April 17 Sandzak is likely to have two competing national councils, further deepening divisions in the Bosniak community and making an already sensitive situation in region more worrying.

Some of the mufti’s opponents say they are relieved that he is boycotting the next vote. The Bosniak Ticket’s Esad Dzudzevic is convinced that Bosniaks will manage to form a national council without him. “It is very good that mufti Zukorlic and the Islamic Community won’t take part in the new elections,” he said.

“This leaves room for the participants [in the new elections] to dedicate their attention to the kind of questions that national councils should deal with under the [2009] law,” he said.

Dzudzevic was referring to the fact that during the campaign for the June 2010 elections, Zukorlic focused on national rather than community issues, concentrating his fire on the authorities in Belgrade under President Boris Tadic whom he accused of discriminating against Bosniaks.

The mufti focused criticism also on his two main Bosniak rivals, Rasim Ljajic and Sulejman Ugljanin, who hold ministerial rank in the Serbian government.

Supporters of the Bosniak Ticket believe it would have been much better if all three parties had reached an agreement on how to proceed based on results of the June elections.

But as that did not happen, new elections are the only legal solution. “We’ve lost six months in these scuffles,” the Bosniak Ticket’s coordinator, Seadetin Mujezinovic, told Balkan Insight.

Sead Biberovic, from the Novi Pazar-based NGO, Urban In, also says new elections offer the only exit from the logjam. The organisation of the new elections suggests that the Serbian state has finally started to respect its own laws, he maintains.

“If only the state had behaved like that from the beginning and respected its own law,” he told Balkan Insight, referring to the sudden change to the rules on the formation of the council made immediately after last year’s elections.

But not all civil society and rights groups share this analysis.

Semiha Kacar, head of the Sandzak Committee for Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms, says new elections should not have been organised. “They should have resumed negotiations and resolved the problem that way,” she said.

Kacar fears new elections for a Bosniak National Council will only deepen rifts in the community and open the way for the formation of two parallel authorities.

Kacar said Belgrade was playing a dangerous game in the Sandzak, by trying to divide and rule.

“Responsibility for everything that is happening lies only with the Bosniak political, cultural and intellectual elite but also the state which is deliberately trying to create chaos in the Bosniak community,” Kacar said, recalling the last-minute change to the rules on the constitution of the Council.

Sead Biberovic accepts that mufti Zukorlic is not likely to give way now, whatever the result of the next round of elections to the council. “The Bosniak Cultural Community will not give up its Council, which they believe is legal and legitimate,” he said.

Zoran Maksimovic is a journalist from Novi Pazar. This article was published with the support of the British embassy in Belgrade as part of BIRN's Training and Reporting Project.