24.09.2024. / 16:38
SREBRENICA – The citizens of Srebrenica were the only ones in BiH to welcome the election campaign – thirsty. The local water supply system is collapsing: some settlements have no water, some only two hours a day.
And while in other municipalities and cities red ribbons are cut and beer and juices are poured, the people of Srebrenica are eager to drink water.
Thus ends the rule of the mayor of the municipality, Mladen Grujičić from SNSD, which lasted a full eight years. Only one thing is certain: Grujicic will no longer be the mayor of Srebrenica, because he is not even a candidate.
For Marinko Sekulić Kokeza, a veteran journalist from Srebrenica, it is one of the rare good news in this small town of Hellebore.
“Every day in Srebrenica is getting sadder and uglier in every way, there are fewer and fewer people, and the vast majority of those who are still there can’t wait for Grujičić and his henchmen to leave the municipality. “Whoever replaces him cannot be worse,” says Sekulić for “Impuls Portal”.
And many of his fellow citizens would agree with him, because there they went through everything, but they did not expect that, in addition to all the other troubles, they would still be left without water.
“The water comes only two hours a day, but the worst thing is, we don’t know when those two hours are. No one follows the schedule published by the utility company,” says a woman from Srebrenica.
On the Facebook profile of the local RTV Srebrenica these days, the most read section is the schedule for the arrival of water tankers. But the citizens state in their comments that even this arrangement is of no use to them: no one can drink water from those cisterns, because they claim that it is not suitable for drinking.
Is this horror just a consequence of the drought and (un)predictable climate changes or is the outgoing local government also responsible for the thirst in Srebrenica?
The still-current mayor Grujičić, who these days does not respond to calls from journalists, announced two years ago on the local media, and then on RTRS, that Srebrenica would get a sports hall with a swimming pool, worth five million KM. And that it will be “financed by the Government of the RS”.
The announced sports pool was never built, and in the meantime the pools of the local water supply have also dried up.
Mladen Grujičić also “forgot” his promise, so recently in his last public address to the local media he said that the temporary solution to the water crisis is “connecting Srebrenica to the water supply from Bratunac”.
For a permanent solution, which also includes bringing water from Bratunac, 11 million marks are needed – Grujičić said.
Srebrenica journalist Mediha Smajić says that these are all “Grujičić’s fantasies”: both him with the swimming pool and this one with a “permanent solution” for the water supply.
“Neither Grujičić, nor the director of the utility company “Polet” Biljana Kandić, whom Grujičić’s government brought to that position, are competent to give such assessments. “After all, even if the water supply system costs 11 million KM, how much money has passed through this city, if a water supply system could have been made of gold,” says Smajićeva.
And really, how many donations, grants, loans, budget money… during the past eight years of SNSD rule, “flowed” through Srebrenica?
And could some of those millions have been set aside for water supply, because as they claim, the problems with water in Srebrenica did not start yesterday.
“TV Žurnal” announced in December 2016 that from the end of the war to the end of that year, at least half a billion marks arrived in Srebrenica, and that “they collected evidence of at least 15 million crimes”.
But that was before SNSD rule. When Grujičić and his team took power eight years ago, the golden age was over, but that doesn’t mean that the donations completely dried up.
Serbia alone, according to Sarajevo’s “Oslobođenja”, donated more than six million euros or 12 million KM in four years. And in 2017, a donation of one million euros from the Saudi Fund arrived. True, the Saudis did not give money for infrastructure projects, but exclusively for the reconstruction of the households of the residents, who had never used donations before.
Could this have “relieved” the local budget? Perhaps.
The budget of Srebrenica is not large, but in the last four years it has constantly recorded a slight growth and from 11.2 million it reached the figure of almost 12.8 million KM.
But five years ago it started – borrowing. For the first time after the war, in 2019, the municipality of Srebrenica borrowed a loan of 2.5 million KM.
Most of that money was intended for the reconstruction of local roads and for the “revival of spa tourism” in the Guber spa. The spa was not rebuilt and today it is surrounded by mines left over from the war, and the money was spent: probably “on purpose”, during the 2020 election year, when Grujičić, as a joint candidate of all “Serbian” parties, won a second mandate.
But in 2023, a new loan of two million KM followed; the asphalting of local roads and the construction of a city garage weighing 900,000 KM, as well as 123,000 KM for the construction of a water supply network, are again planned. However…
The mayor of the municipality, Mladen Grujičić, then, as reported by the “Srna” agency, stated that “the loan funds will not be used immediately for the mentioned projects, but for the rehabilitation of debts, while the projects planned with the loan will be realized as the budget is filled”.
Even then, the municipality had 1.8 million KM in debt, as it was said, “mainly for the transportation of students”.
Tenders for the transportation of students were announced and canceled several times. And the water supply did not make it to the turn, except in one tender, when “Mark Miltex doo”, the company of Miloš Mihajlović from Srebrenica, received KM 30,000 for the work of “making a water supply in Gornji Potočari”.
In the last four years, Mihajlović’s companies “Mark Miltex” and “Euromiks” have received several more jobs from the municipality at tenders and in direct negotiations, with a total value of almost one million KM.
Streams still have no water. And Miloš Mihajlović was among the five “successful businessmen”, to whom during his visit to Srebrenica in 2021, the Prime Minister of the RS, Radovan Višković, personally “expressed his gratitude”.
Did all those “successful businessmen” manage to employ the people of Srebrenica? Obviously they are not, because despite millions of investments by the Government of RS and the Government of Serbia, there are fewer employees in Srebrenica today than there were eight years ago, according to the interlocutors of “Impuls Portal”.
“All this poor woman in Srebenica needs is water and bread. Water from the water supply and a job to earn their own bread”, says Mediha Smajić.
Until 2017, the Government of Serbia paid five million euros to the municipality of Srebrenica: as stated, part for “direct budget support”, part for “infrastructure projects, including water supply”, and part for economic projects and employment.
It was the occasion for Mladen Grujičić to put up billboards with the image of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and the message “Grateful Srebrenica” in 2020, ahead of his “rush” to the second mayoral mandate.
And Vučić was not angry, even though an affair broke out a year earlier that shook the region.
In 2019, the Belgrade newspaper “Afera” announced that Grujičić, with the help of a relative of a court expert, “raised” the price of a hall in Potočari, which had neither windows nor doors and whose roof had collapsed, and bought it for 850,000 euros, instead of the realistic 500,000 euros. Millions donated by Serbia for the employment of Srebrenica were allegedly invested in that transaction.
Other media also wrote that from the money previously paid by Serbia to the account of the municipality of Srebrenica, Grujičić bought from the Slovene Miha Živec a hall where an asylum for dogs was opened and where, instead of the planned 300, only five workers were employed, who chop wood there .
The mayor of Srebrenica denied accusations by the media that part of that money was “taken by Grujičić and his associates”, claiming that the purchase of the hall was approved by the Srebrenica Municipal Assembly and that “everything was transparent”.
There was no official investigation into this case.
And the public, of course, does not know what happened behind the scenes after all.
Only Mladen Grujičić did not run, even though he publicly “offered” to be the “candidate of all Serbian parties” for the mayor of Srebrenica for the third time. He failed.
“All Serbian parties” nominated a new face – Miloš Vučić, an immigrant from Bugojno, who is allegedly a relative of the President of Serbia.
And “all Bosniak parties” nominated a common candidate, Hamdija Fejzić, a Bosniak with a vivid war and post-war biography.
Will the mayor, who “comes after Grujičić”, really be surrounded by a smaller number of poltrons? And who will be Grujicic’s successor: the Serb Vučić or the Bosniak Fejzić?
For decades, the elections in Srebrenica have been of such a kind that only the ethnicity of the candidates is important and recognizable: all their other identities, including party affiliation and competencies, are absolutely unimportant.
Because there won’t be true elections in Srebrenica this year either, only ethnic alignment and reckoning.
The “buses” will decide again. The key question is whether the Serbs, gathered around the SNSD, will bring more buses from Serbia and Republika Srpska, with citizens who have ID cards with the rubric “residence in Srebrenica”, or whether the Bosniaks will bring more buses from other cities of the Federation of BiH and from far away abroad, with documents in which the main item is “my address Srebrenica”.
And this year, those who truly live and spend the night in Srebrenica will be the least likely to question that decision. There are few of them. And they are thirsty. And desperate.
Source: www.capital.ba
