‘Free and Fair’ Bosnia Vote Faces Obstacles on All Sides

Minutes before he was to announce hard-fought rules for Bosnia’s planned elections, the American diplomat in charge, Robert Frowick, was hit with a sudden barrage of criticism from the Bosnian government.

The rules, the government’s representative told a stunned Frowick, sanction the brutal “ethnic cleansing” that characterized Bosnia’s just-ended war by letting refugees vote where they currently live rather than guaranteeing their return home to vote.

Red-faced from anger and exasperation, Frowick told his critics that compromise, however painful, is the only solution, according to a person who was present.

Ever since that behind-the-scenes exchange last month, the Bosnian government has protested the election preparations and reserved judgment over whether it will participate at all.

Elections are seen as a key step in building legitimate government institutions if peace is to hold in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

But most human rights and independent election-monitoring organizations agree that the conditions for “free and fair” voting, as laid out in the U.S.-brokered Bosnia peace agreement, do not exist and are not likely to exist in time for the scheduled September poll.

The required conditions--freedom of the press, movement and association, and the ability of refugees to return home--are particularly illusory in the Serb-held half of Bosnia.

The Muslim-led Bosnian government, along with its Serbian and Croatian counterparts, has additional motives for objecting to the way the elections are shaping up, diplomats and observers say. In each case, the nationalist parties currently in control benefit from the status quo; the longer elections are delayed, the longer the three factions have to tighten their grips on power.

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“The ruling parties are only strengthening their positions day to day, and postponement will also strengthen them,” said Srdjan Dizdarevic, head of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Bosnia-Herzegovina and one of the authors of a scathing report on election preparations. “The three parties do not want elections.”

This is quite a dilemma, Dizdarevic and others say, because while delay might have its adverse consequences, so might going ahead as planned. Holding elections under the current circumstances would be disastrous, these observers say.

The most troubling obstacle, by most accounts, is the continued dominance of indicted war-crimes suspects Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, who have withstood Western efforts to remove them as required by the peace accord.

An election with the Bosnian Serb leaders in place would legitimize their authority and the war crimes they are accused of committing, including the slaughter of thousands of Muslims, diplomats and human rights monitors say.

“It is difficult to see any condition for the holding of elections [being] met if Karadzic and Mladic are in or near power,” said Terence Clark of the International Crisis Group, an independent organization monitoring compliance with the peace accord. “Without their removal, there will be a political blocking across the board in the implementation of [the peace plan], especially the elections.”

Despite the dire assessments, the Clinton administration appears determined to see the elections take place on schedule and is said to be pressuring the international organizational team here to follow suit.

A delay would probably force the American-led peacekeeping mission, whose job it is to provide security for elections, to extend its time in Bosnia beyond the year-end deadline, something Washington is studiously avoiding. Even though a sizable phaseout force is expected to remain in Bosnia through January, the Pentagon says it will consider the U.S. military mission concluded Dec. 20.

Frowick is head of the Bosnia office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is in charge of organizing Bosnia’s enormously complicated elections. Under the peace accord, Frowick must certify by late June that proper conditions exist. If the elections get the green light, they must take place no later than Sept. 14.

“The [peace] agreement does not say that we have to have a perfectly functioning democracy in place,” Washington’s chief Bosnia mediator, acting Assistant Secretary of State John Kornblum, said in a visit to Sarajevo last week. “In fact, the elections are there to lay the foundation for a functioning democracy.”

After failed efforts by the West to oust them, Karadzic and Mladic seem to have a firmer-than-ever grasp on power. Hard-line Serb legislator Momcilo Krajisnik, a Karadzic crony, went on television over the weekend to emphasize that Karadzic is still “president.” Krajisnik also declared that the Bosnian Serb ideal of secession and union with Greater Serbia--a principal cause of the war--remains his government’s goal.

The presence of Karadzic and Mladic feeds another of the principal problems with the peace accord and, in turn, the elections: the failure to return significant numbers of refugees to their homes. Karadzic refuses to allow Muslims to return to the vast areas of Bosnia the “ethnic cleansing” of which he engineered early in the war.

Despite the peace accord’s stated intentions, most Bosnians will not be able to vote in their own villages and cities, so Frowick’s election committees drafted rules to allow for absentee balloting.

Unsatisfied, the Bosnian government argues that such a system of voting will ultimately affirm the gains of “ethnic cleansing.” A town like Srebrenica, for example, was almost all Muslim before it fell to Bosnian Serb forces in July. Even if Srebrenica survivors voted absentee, they would have to vote for candidates who are current occupants of the city--most of whom are Bosnian Serb refugees from other parts of the country.

“Lately, the negative elements [of the peace plan] are more and more prevailing, and that is creating a fear among our people, a fear that might lead to the disintegration of the country,” Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic said Friday. “These facts are, in our opinion, calling into question the free and fair elections.”

In the elections, Bosnians will choose regional and national leaders. It will be the first poll since 1991, the year before the war started.

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The dedication to democracy on the part of the U.S.-supported Sarajevo government was called into question last week with statements by Edhem Bicakcic, the hard-line vice president of the ruling Party of Democratic Action and a close associate of Izetbegovic.

Speaking to Bosnian reporters, Bicakcic said his party would “act without mercy” against smaller opposition groups to prevent the fragmentation of Muslim unity.

In the uproar that followed, Bicakcic said he was referring to political battle, not the repression that several opposition parties immediately feared.

That is only one of many examples of the restrictions on democratic exercise that continue to plague Bosnia. There is little authentically free movement across ethnic lines; virtually no access of opposition parties to state-controlled television; and routine harassment and intimidation of journalists and opposition politicians.

“The people of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” the Helsinki Federation report said, “have not yet had opportunities to think and act freely, to travel and associate without fear, to hear and reflect upon differing points of view--in other words, to exist in a society respecting human rights, the rule of law and the principles of democracy.”

The climate is most restrictive in the Serbian half of Bosnia and in the domain of hard-line nationalist Bosnian Croats around the south-central city of Mostar; but all three factions come in for criticism.

Separate municipal elections in Mostar, meanwhile, were postponed from May 31 to late June when the city’s two sides--Croats and Muslims--could not agree on rules. That troubled vote is seen as a dry run for the national elections.