SARAJEVO (Bosnia and Herzegovina), September 26 (SeeNews) – Bosnia's chief prosecutor has summoned the president of the country's Serb-dominated entity, Milorad Dodik, for questioning over the holding of a disputed referendum in defiance of a Constitutional Court ban, local media reported on Monday.
Milorad Dodik is the only political leader served with a summons for questioning over the illegal act of organising the statehood day referendum on Sunday, Nezavisne Novine daily reported.
The Prosecutor's Office has opened an investigation into the referendum, according to Bosnian media reports.
A total of 99.81% of the citizens of Bosnia's Serb Republic voted to keep January 9 as the entity's statehood day, according to the first complete preliminary results released earlier on Monday.
Turnout in Sunday's vote was just over 55% of the 1.2 million people eligible to vote, Sinisa Karan, president of the referendum committee, told local broadcaster RTRS.
Only 0.19% of voters objected to keeping January 9 as statehood day, while 2,264 invalid ballots were cast.
Bosniak politicians said that the referendum was a failure as voter turnout was much lower than expected by the ruling Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, SNSD. However, both the president and the prime minister of the Serb republic have referred to the vote as a win.
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 of the entity - 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 urged them to 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 SNSD to muster votes ahead of the October 2 local elections.
The event which pushed many to question the motive behind organising such an endeavor, 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 rhetoric reminiscent of the 1990s 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.