The Central Election Commission (CEC) of Bosnia and Herzegovina will consider whether there are elements of a violation of the BiH Election Law in the video of the political party “United Srpska”. CEC President Zeljko Bakalar confirmed to Al Jazeera that the CEC will consider the legality of the disputed video, after provoking harsh public reactions on social media, including that the video spreads interfaith and interethnic intolerance among the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A little less than two months before the local elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina on November 15, “Ujedinjena Srpska” published a controversial video that lasts a little less than a minute.
The new pre-election video of the United Srpska and its leader Nenad Stevandic, due to its controversial content, received a lot of criticism in a short period of time. In the video released yesterday, three young men appear, who stereotypically represent Albanians, Croats and Bosniaks, and the messages they utter are aggressive and allude to the aggressor motive of these peoples towards Serbs.
At the end of the video, Stevandic appears, otherwise a member of the House of Representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH, who says that the Republika Srpska is united and that it will always be that way, Klix.ba news portal reports.
The United Srpska later stated that this was not a pre-election video, as if there was not a single segment related to the elections in the video itself.
“This is a video presentation of the declaration adopted at the assembly of the United Srpska held on September 12, which speaks of the need for the necessary unity in the Republika Srpska on vital issues. There were several such videos and they did not have pre-election connotations,” they wrote.
Stevandic himself wrote that everything in the video is true.
