Bosnian Serb leaders are celebrating a landslide victory in a controversial referendum, but the European Union insists the result has no legal basis and Bosnia's national prosecutors have opened an investigation into the vote.
Officials in Republika Srpska, the Serb-run region of Bosnia, said 99.8 per cent of voters in Sunday’s referendum chose to keep January 9th as their “statehood day” holiday, in defiance of a ruling from the multiethnic country’s constitutional court.
The court said the holiday discriminates against Bosnia’s Muslim Bosniak and Catholic Croat communities because it coincides with a Serbian Orthodox Church holiday.
The date is also politically sensitive, because it marks the day in 1992 when Bosnian Serbs broke with the rest of the Yugoslav republic, ahead of a three-year war in which 100,000 people were killed and ethnic Serbs committed genocide against Bosniaks.
"I'm so proud ... of all those who voted," said Milorad Dodik, the nationalist Bosnian Serb president who called the vote despite western warnings and anger from Bosniaks who accuse him of trying to de-stabilise and even break up the state.
Mr Dodik said Bosnian Serbs had “written one more page of our glorious history and we said that we are people who fight for freedom”. Turnout was reported to be 55.77 per cent.
The vote was believed to have cost cash-strapped Republika Srpska about €750,000, and many people accused Mr Dodik of seeking to stir up nationalist fervour one week before local elections across Bosnia.
On Monday, prosecutors in Sarajevo announced they were opening a high priority investigation into the referendum for its alleged breach of Bosnia’s constitution, and several people – including Mr Dodik – had been summoned for questioning.
Before the referendum, the US and EU jointly called for calm and urged against any actions that would de-stabilise or divide Bosnia; Russia declined to sign that appeal, and Mr Dodik visited the Kremlin on the eve of the vote.
European Commission spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic said on Monday that the referendum "has no legal basis ... and cannot change the final and binding nature of decisions of the constitutional court".
Bosniak leader Bakir Izetbegovic accused Mr Dodik and allies of committing a "blatant" breach of the Dayton Accords that ended the 1992-5 war, and of "obstructing decisions by the constitutional court, of violating the penal code."
“The only question is when there will be a reaction to this and the form it will take,” he added.
