Bosniak coalition in Srebrenica urges CEC to investigate alleged election fraud

Nova BH

Bosniaks in Srebrenica would face various obstructions in the process of getting their identification documents so they can vote in the local election on Sunday while many people were allowed to vote without possessing valid Bosnian documents, the candidate for the post of mayor, Alija Tabakovic, and members of the Bosniak coalition in the town said at a press conference on Wednesday.

The final results of the 2020 local election have still not been published but, according to the latest results, it seems that the current mayor, Bosnian Serb Mladen Grujicic, will be reelected.

However, according to members of the Bosniak ‘Moja adresa: Srebrenica’ (My address: Srebrenica) coalition, this is a result of alleged election fraud and discrimination.

“Srebrenica citizens who wanted to obtain an ID card in Srebrenica faced numerous obstructions,” said one of the members of the coalition, Sadik Ahmetovic.

He said that the institutions would have power outages and other technical difficulties that were intentional in order to prevent Bosniaks from receiving the documents.

“After all of that, all those hordes of citizens from Serbia came, police were allowed to work until 7 pm, and the post office and municipality worked at full capacity. There was discrimination and there was a different approach towards the citizens of Srebrenica,” he said, according to the Faktor web portal.

He announced criminal complaints against all those who obstructed the process of acquiring documentation for Srebrenica’s citizens.

“We will not allow Serbia to trample us this way. We have won in Srebrenica,” he said.

Ahmetovic presented a list from the Interior Ministry of Bosnia’s semi-autonomous Republika Srpska (RS) entity which he said contains the names of 1,400 people who do not possess any valid Bosnian documentation but were on the electoral roll in Srebrenica.

“Our observers marked the names of those without documents at every polling station,” he said, urging the Central Election Commission (CEC) to check the allegations and compare the register with the electoral roll.