Serbia Puts Bosniak Council Vote On Hold

Serbia's minister for local government and human and minority rights, Milan Markovic, announced the postponement to the vote on Wednesday, saying a new date would be set after consultations with participants in last year's disputed elections.

Markovic said he took the decision to postpone the elections after all three Bosniak [Muslim] lists that took part in the last vote failed to register for the April 17 rerun.

The first election to the Bosniak National Council took place last June but was mired in controversy from the start. Under a law adopted in 2009, Serbia established national councils for all ethnic minorities, with a view to giving them more control over their own affairs. The councils were endowed with a number of competences in the fields of education, culture and the media.

But the formation of a National Council for Serbia's Bosniak community, which is concentrated in the southwest Sandzak region, has proved highly contentious.

The party that won most votes in the June 2010 election, the Bosniak Cultural Community, BKZ, led by a radical mufti, Muamer Zukorlic, is at loggerheads with Belgrade. The government disputed Zukorlic's victory and insisted on a new round of voting.

While Belgrade has not recognised the National Council since the disputed election, it has operated in defiance of central government since its formation.

Samir Tandir, president of the Bosniak Cultural Community, said his party had never intended to take part in a rerun. "As far as we are concerned, the Bosniak National Council has already been formed," he said today.

But Tandir sounded a conciliatory note, adding that, "If talks were to start and include several issues, we would be ready to consider taking part in new elections".

The dialogue "would have to encompass talks about other open issues in Sandzak," he continued, "such as attempts to install a parallel Islamic Community [to the mufti's], accrediting the International University, reinstalling religious teachers who were kicked out of schools illegally and unconstitutionally, and returning waqf [Islamic] property to the Islamic Community."

An official from the Bosniak Ticket, Esad Dzudzevic, said it was good that the National Council elections had been postponed. He urged Serbia to make some goodwill gestures to the community.

These should start with probes into war crimes committed against Bosniaks in the 1990s, reform of the Sandzak municipal boundaries and action on improving access to Bosniak language and culture.

A representative of the Bosniak Rennaissance, Seadetin Mujezinovic, also expressed support for the move. "We immediately accepted the proposal for a delay," Mujezinovic told Balkan Insight.

He said new elections should only be called when all the conditions for polls were met, adding that the voting lists needed to be reviewed and corrected.

The Bosniak National Council needed to represent the unity of the Bosniaks, and not, as was the case since the last elections, division and schism, he continued.

Journalist Edo Celebic said the delay to the vote might help calm tensions, which have risen in the Sandzak region in the last month.  "Minister Markovic now has an opportunity to become better acquainted with the whole situation," he told Balkan Insight.

The president of the Sandzak Committee for the Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms, Semiha Kacar, agreed. "The government must prepare the next elections for the Council properly," she said. "Not one list had registered for the poll by the deadline, so in my view, these elections were not well prepared," Kacar added.