SARAJEVO (Bosnia and Herzegovina), September 26 (SeeNews) – Bosnia's Serb Republic has voted overwhelmingly to keep January 9 as its statehood day in an illegal referendum held in the entity on Sunday, according to preliminary results.
With just over 70% of the votes counted by midnight, 99.79% of the citizens supported keeping the holiday, the referendum commission president, Sinisa Karan, said live on local broadcaster RTRS.
Karan believes that the final voter turnout will be between 56 and 60%.
The referendum defied a ban issued by Bosnia's Constitutional Court.
The Serb Republic announced last month that it will hold a referendum on September 25 to decide whether the statehood day should continue to be held on January 9 - the day of the Serb Republic's inception in 1992, just prior to the outbreak of the war in Bosnia.
The decision came as a response to a November ruling by the Constitutional Court, which declared the Serb Republic's statehood day as unconstitutional and, as such, discriminatory against the other two constituent peoples - the Bosniaks and Croats. The court said that January 9 cannot be a state holiday because it is also a Christian Eastern Orthodox saint's day and thus exclusionary of the entity's citizens who are not of this faith.
The referendum was opposed by Bosniaks, whose political leaders insisted they boycott the vote. It was also condemned by opposition parties in the Serb Republic's government who called the referendum useless and a political ploy by the ruling Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, SNSD, to muster votes ahead of the October 2 local elections.
The event which pushed many to question the motive behind organising such an endeavour, was last week's announcement by the Serb Republic government that it is planning to implement the very decision, brought by the Constitutional Court, the referendum is challenging.
The National Assembly announced that it is amending its law on entity-based holidays to implement the decision of the high court, reducing the referendum to a questionnaire, many political figures deemed.
The referendum also sparked war rhetoric reminiscent of the 1990's war in Bosnia but the predominant view is that the situation will calm as soon as the local elections are over.
"The hype is created for the purpose of local elections. Simply put, local politicians are spinning the public to distract it from questions and problems they don't have answers to. They are creating a crisis and causing fear by engaging in war talk and presenting themselves as saviours", Srdjan Puhalo, a Banja Luka-based analyst, told SeeNews last week.
The Serb Republic is one of two entities that make up Bosnia and Herzegovina. The other is the Muslim-Croat Federation.