A Premature Vote Is Worse Than No Vote

A stay in a high-security hotel in the center of Algiers with every move in the company of two Kalashnikov-bearing bodyguards may not be the obvious circumstance for writing about elections in Bosnia. News about the violently crushed demonstrations in Albania two weeks ago may not be the obvious inspiration for writing about them either.

Yet both situations--the virtual civil war in Algeria and the unrest in Albania--have something in common: They resulted from elections that were held while the conditions did not guarantee that the ballot would be fair and free. Bear with me, it will lead us to Bosnia.

In the case of Algeria, the legislative elections were held in December 1991. The army-backed secular government canceled them after the first round when Islamic militants were poised to win, and all hell broke loose. Now, with hindsight, in the fourth year of the country being hostage to a terrorist scare, people of almost all political tendencies (I am not interviewing the Islamic extremists because I fit all too well their deadly target lists, which feature journalists, foreigners and women) assure me that the calling to the ballot boxes at that particular time was a mistake, that there were no conditions for free and fair elections.

Events in Albania, although different, bear a similar lesson. The parliamentary elections were held there on May 26. The Democratic Party of President Sali Berisha was a shoo-in, and yet there were numerous press reports of stuffed ballot boxes, altered ballots and intimidation. The opposition parties (former communists and new formations) withdrew. Two monitoring groups condemned the electoral violations. Eleven delegates of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the main election monitor, made a clear statement: These elections were neither free nor fair and the level of fraud calls for cancellation. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead, Berisha announced that elections will be repeated in 13 of 115 districts on June 16. The outcome will not change the overall result, favoring the Democratic Party.

Now back to Bosnia.

A conference to review the progress of the Dayton agreement opened last week in Florence. On the agenda is the ruling by the OSCE whether conditions exist in Bosnia for holding free and fair elections. The criteria, defined by Ambassador Robert Frowick, the chief of the OSCE mission in Bosnia, are, among others: freedom of movement, freedom of association and freedom of expression. I spent most of May in Mostar, Bosnia, and I am convinced that even within the supposedly integrated Bosnian-Croat Federation, those conditions are not met. In the other part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republika Srpska, still governed by Radovan Karadzic, an indicted war criminal running loose, the situation is much worse. Freedom of movement between these two entities is simply nonexistent. Mine is not a maverick opinion. Nongovernment organizations, especially human rights groups, and even internal reports of OSCE monitors confirm this verdict.

In spite of heavy pressure from the Clinton administration to give the green light for the all-Bosnia elections, Flavio Cotti, the Swiss foreign minister who is serving as chairman of OSCE has not yet determined whether he will certify that free and fair voting is possible. “If even minimal conditions are not met, then I believe it will be better to delay elections . . . . If these elections degenerate into a farce and a drama, then it will be a negative exercise for all of the parties involved,” he declared recently.

Although in Florence last week, U.S. envoy Robert Frowick made a recommendation to go ahead with the elections, Cotti has until July 14 to make up his mind because a minimum of two months of campaigning is required before Sept. 14, the deadline fixed in the Dayton plan for elections. This leaves 30 days to ponder whether after such fast-forwarded elections Bosnia will immediately relapse into some new form of civil war that is its hallmark, or will it rather sink into some terrorism a la Algeria after a period of unrest a la Albania.

However, even if the guns in Bosnia remain silent, elections held under the present conditions will only serve to confirm the divisions introduced by ethnic cleansing and the grip on power by the hard-liners who started the conflict in the first place. Is this what the Dayton architects had in mind?

Where Bosnia is concerned, many a pledge has been broken, yet I am still puzzled when I hear the Secretary of State Warren Christopher announce that elections will “give all the people of Bosnia a chance to shape their future,” while it is obvious that these elections will be neither fair nor free.

Perhaps I appear somewhat panicky in my temporary Algiers headquarters and with Albania on my mind. But I come from Poland, a country in which a single election--the first one after World War II, decided by external powers--was allowed to be falsified, and this turned out to be the last real election we had for more than four decades.

For the Bosnians, will Dayton be synonymous with Yalta?