Award-winning Bosnian director Jasmila Zbanic, urged the Government of Sarajevo Canton and Bosnia's Federation (FBiH) entity via Facebook to close all restaurants, cultural venues, delay election rallies and local elections due to the poor epidemiological situation in the Canton.

Zbanic told the Crisis Staff: “We felt safer with the Chetniks around Sarajevo than with you managing our lives,” adding that doctors and medical staff are exhausted.

Chetniks are Serb nationalists who, along with Serb army and police forces from the then breakaway Republika Srpska entity laid siege on Sarajevo during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, shelling it and killing its citizens with sniper fire from locations just above the city.

“Introduce measures like those in Germany, France, and Austria. Urgently close everything for a month. Your unprofessionalism and cowardice are killing us!!!”, she wrote.

After testing 1,324 samples, collected in the period from November 2 to 6 this year, including the remaining tests collected by the Public Health Centre in Sarajevo Canton and those processed in private laboratories, 507 newly infected patients with coronavirus were confirmed in the Canton.