Beside the fact that Serbian Montenegrins differ in many respects, another aggravating circumstance for the upcoming elections for the National Council of Montenegrins in Serbia, NS, is lack of control over enrolments for a certain electoral roll, as it now includes many people not being Montenegrins. Nenad Stevović, a researcher in the area of Montenegrin diaspora, reckons that the Law on National Councils gives the umbrella institutions of 20 national communities in the Republic of Serbia great powers and autonomy in exercising rights in preserving the national identity, especially in the area of culture, education, official language and information processing in their own language.
Stevović told Pobjeda, a daily: “Those rights and powers are at the same level as in the most democratic countries in Europe.”
As for the law, he added, there are certain shortcomings when it comes to the election of members of the national councils.
“Any citizen of Serbia can sign up for a member of a national community, without any specific evidence for belonging to it but his/her own free will. Also, a citizen can sign out whenever he/she wishes to do so and afterwards sign in for some other national community. One cannot have the insight into the electoral roll, as only the relevant ministry can do so,” explained Stevović.
According to him, members of such an important institutions should be elected by the citizens who belong to that community by their ethnic origin.
The president of the National Council of Montenegrins in Serbia, Miodrag Becić, told Pobjeda daily he has also disapproved of the lack of proper control over enrolment for a specific electoral roll.
“We heard that some weird things are happening in places where we do not have registered communities of Montenegrins, that is, there has come to an increase in the number of people signed in a specific electoral roll. That happened in Pančevo and Smederevska Palanka even though we haven’t received any kind of information from these places for 4 years, and now we hear there are 3-4 voters there. Our National Council does not possess any tool for preventing such situations.”
Becić concluded that today any person can declare as he/she wishes in terms of their nationality, and that Montenegrins are being suitable for such manipulations due to their traditional ties with Serbs.
