Apart from the Croat community, the Hungarian and German national minorities in Subotica and the region would also lose programmes on their mother tongues.
At its last session before 21 January elections, the Serbian government last week gave its consent to the initiative aimed at the privatisation of Radio Subotica, ignoring the fact that this was a radio station providing news in the languages of national minorities.
The Vojvodina government asked the state authorities to stop the privatisation of the radio station and moved for amendments to the law on radio-fusion so as to enable the electronic media airing multilingual programmes to be exempt from the mandatory privatisation procedure and granted local public service status.
The Croat National Council also pointed to this problem, stressing that this could lead to the shutting down of the only daily radio programme in Croatian in Serbia.