Demographer Stevo Pasalic says that Republika Srpska must seriously deal with the issue of the BiH population census since data which the director of the BiH Statistics Agency, Velimir Jukic, wants to publish, in the long run, can shake up the constitutionality of peoples in BiH.
Pasalic says that Republika Srpska representatives at the BiH level acted indifferently which, he says, is the major problem.
He told SRNA that Croats defended more fiercely this issue than Bosniaks at a session of the BiH House of Representatives held yesterday, which is a strong message to Serbs that their institutions must take seriously this issue.
“Their goal was to achieve the percentage of 50.1% of Bosniaks in BiH, and they fixed it so,” Pasalic said.
He feels that the director of the BiH Statistics Agency, Velimir Jukic, brought a unilateral decision on a single programme for the BiH population census data processing under pressure since he has the impression that everything is ready to publish all data by July 1 after the single methodology is adopted.
“It is impossible to completely process the data in a month if Jukic accepted the methodology a few days go. This leads us to suspect that the data are already ready, processed and significantly fixed, and the reason for suspicion are also the reports by certain media in the FBiH which gave precise data on the number of residents and ethnic structure,” Pasalic claims.
He said that according to these data, there are 50.1% of Bosniaks living in BiH, even though those who are dealing with demography cannot arrive at such data since they speak that the fewest Bosniaks left the country in the past 20 years.
“We have ready data which we will present to show that these data which they call average are not true. When one speaks of estimates, it is always said around, near, more than, and their data are strict on how many people live in BiH. At the same time, the International Monitoring Group published the same data, and it is strange that their data are exactly the same,” Pasalic said.
He said that the census must mobilise all relevant institutions in Srpska to take this issue seriously in order to return the population census in the frame of legal methodology and profession, and not to be under the direct pressure of politics.
Pasalic praised the move of the Republika Srpska Statistics Office which today sent letters to the director of the BiH Statistics Agency, Velimir Jukic, the Chairman of the BiH Council of Ministers, Denis Zvizdic, and Council members, and to relevant domestic and foreign institutions and individuals, feeling that population census results should be shown objectively.
He said that these are good moves, even though the BiH Statistics Agency does not want to even talk about it anymore.
“I hope that we will use all mechanisms to arrive at relevant, true data, since no one needs inflated data which will be completely useless in practice,” Pasalic said.
Source: SRNA
