Croatia Polls: Apathy in Serbia

Political analysts in Serbia predicted on Friday a low turnout of local residents who are entitled to vote in neighbouring Croatia’s elections on Sunday.

According to estimates, only a few thousand voters will cast their ballots at seven polling stations in Belgrade and in Serbia’s northern province of Vojvodina.

More than 100,000 people eligible to vote in Croatia’s elections live in Serbia.

About 80,000 of them are Serbs who fled Croatia, following the end of the war there in 1995.

Another 25,000 are ethnic Croats, most of whom live in Serbia’s north.
Ratko Bubalo of the Novi Sad-based Centre for Integration said that “the three Serb deputies in the Croatian parliament did little to resolve the problems of Serb returnees to Croatia.”
“Reclaiming property, employment, pensions, all these are outstanding issues for Croatian Serbs that have not been settled properly for most of the returnees,” Bubalo said.

Some 250,000 Serbs fled Croatia after the 1995 offensive on a self-proclaimed Serb mini-state there.Most are still in Serbia although a number has returned.

Ethnic Croats will also be reluctant to vote as they “receive no benefits from Croatia, nor do they expect any,” said Tomislav Zigmanov, editor in-chief of the Croatian minority’s Hrvatska rijec weekly.

“While Croatia invested some 200 million kuna (€27 million) in the development of a university campus” in Croatian part of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s divided city of Mostar, “its total aid for Croats in Serbia in 2006 was only 2 million kuna (€273,000),” Zigmanov said.

Both Bubalo and Zigmanov said that a majority of votes is likely go to Croatia’s main opposition force, the Social Democratic Party.