The Serb National Council (SNV) warned on Sunday that several irregularities in the current process of census taking were reported in the village of Smilcic in the southern Benkovac municipality, and in Viskovo municipality near the northern Adriatic city of Rijeka, with census takers advising citizens not to declare themselves Orthodox Serbs.
Addressing a news conference in Zagreb, SNV president Milorad Pupovac said irregularities were also identified in Borovo Naselje near Vukovar, where local residents reported cases of census takers telling them that they did not need to declare their ethnicity and religion. It was also reported that not all census takers had with them census forms printed in ethnic minorities' languages and scripts.
Under the Constitution, citizens do not have to declare their religion or ethnicity, but it is not up to census takers to make any suggestions in that regard, said Pupovac.
The cases were reported to the central Bureau of Statistics, the census taker in Smilcic was suspended, and the census taker in Viskovo is likely to be suspended, said Pupovac.
Pupovac believes that the census form is not appropriate because, despite suggestions from EUROSTAT, the EU's statistics office, it does not contain all the necessary answers on one's ethnicity, religion and language.
If the census form had been designed to include all the necessary answers, census takers would not be able to suggest answers on their own, Pupovac said.
"We want cases like these to stop and we want that it be established who gave census takers such instructions and why," he said, calling on citizens to report all similar cases to local census centres.
The population and housing census in Croatia started on April 1.
