Dodik: Seats in Serbian parliament for Serbs outside Serbia

BELGRADE - President of Republika Srpska (RS) Milorad Dodik has called for changes in Serbia’s electoral legislation to enable the Serbs outside Serbia to have representatives in the Serbian parliament.

In an interview for Belgrade-based daily Danas, Dodik said he did not see why Belgrade should not change the electoral law and provide seats in the parliament for representatives of Serbs outside Serbia and pointed to the examples of other countries, primarily neighboring Croatia.

“No matter how many of us turn out to vote, the quota for the RS could be four to five seats, for Montenegro, two to three, and one each for Macedonia and Western Europe,” said Dodik.

We believe the time is opportune to think in this direction, Since Serbia is considering amending the Constitution, said the president of the RS, the Serbian entity in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

He said that he had sought a permanent liberalization in terms of granting Serbian passports to the Serbs in the RS, as they wanted Serbian citizenship. “I think every single Serb must obtain Serbian citizenship, so that we can show our loyalty to the mother country that we see as our homeland,” said Dodik.

He said he was grateful to Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic for helping speed up the procedure, but he thought it could still be faster.

Commenting on the investigation into war crimes against Serbs in Kosovo-Metohija, conducted by a special EU task force led by U.S. prosecutor John Clint Williamson, Dodik said he did not believe it would lead to filing an indictment against outgoing Kosovo Prime Minister Hasim Taci.

He explained that he did not believe that Taci, former commander of the ethnic Albanians’ paramilitary...