Bosnia’s Muslim Regime Tries to Quell Opposition

The grenade that punched a hole in the side of Avdo Sepic’s house in the middle of the night last week, just above the head of his sleeping daughter, sent a message.

It was not meant to kill but to silence, Sepic says. He and scores of opposition politicians in Bosnia-Herzegovina have become victims of a violent campaign of intimidation and persecution carried out by state security forces and hard-line militants from the ruling Muslim party bent on stifling alternative views, according to international human rights monitors and Western officials.

With less than three weeks to go before Bosnia’s first postwar elections, opposition activists have reported beatings, shootings, attacks with explosives and nuisance arrests. Opposition literature and campaign posters are routinely destroyed--often by the police. Some activists have lost their jobs or been threatened with eviction. Parties say their supporters are so frightened that some have dropped out of races or stopped attending rallies.

The targets are not the ruling Muslims’ ethnic rivals but fellow Muslims. The nationalist Democratic Action Party, or SDA, of President Alija Izetbegovic is using slogans and speeches to equate voting for it with true patriotism and obedience to Islam.

Similar strong-arm tactics are common in the parts of Bosnia controlled by Serbian and Croatian nationalists. But repression by the Muslim-led government poses a bigger problem for the Clinton administration, which supports it politically, financially and militarily. The Muslim-controlled part of Bosnia, after all, had been seen as the last hope for a society of ethnic and democratic tolerance.

Opposition activists are labeled traitors. In a country only just emerging from a vicious war, emotions are raw and such labels are dangerous.

“To call a person a traitor in a climate like this is a direct invitation to physical attack; anything can happen,” said Rifet Bahdic, a psychologist from the city of Sanski Most who heads the opposition Bosnia-Herzegovina Party there.

“The ruling party wants one party, one state, one faith,” said Hamdo Delalic, chairman of the same opposition organization here in Cazin. “There is no democracy in that.”

Nationwide elections, scheduled for Sept. 14, are required under the U.S.-brokered peace accord that halted the Bosnian war eight months ago.

Attacks have been reported in many cities and villages, but in few places have campaign violence and police complicity been more blatant than in the northwestern pocket of Bosnia around Cazin and Bihac, both under Bosnian Serb siege throughout most of the 43-month war.

On Sunday, the head of the U.N. International Police Task Force, Commissioner Peter Fitzgerald of Ireland, met with senior state security officers in Bihac to complain about the “perception” that the police are working at the behest of a political party. But his mild rebuke seemed to have little effect on the officers, who afterward told a reporter they considered opposition complaints to be exaggerated and insignificant.

The Bihac area is especially tense in part because a renegade group of Muslim separatists, following popular businessman Fikret Abdic, turned on the Sarajevo government during the war. Abdic is viewed by the Bosnian government as a war criminal, and, since the fighting stopped, his followers have suffered steady reprisals.

Many other Muslims who remained loyal to Sarajevo and battled hard to defend Bihac, but who now oppose Izetbegovic’s brand of Muslim nationalism, are also coming under attack. Their credentials do not seem in dispute: Delalic, for example, was a decorated brigadier from the Bosnian army’s well-regarded 5th Corps; Bahdic says he spent six months in a Bosnian Serb labor camp at the start of the war.

“We are part of the same ethnic group, but because of that they think we should all think alike,” said Hasib Buganovic, an opposition candidate at the municipal level who was beaten up the other day as he walked through the center of Cazin, his hometown, by a man who accused him of “working against us.”

“It makes me feel humiliated. I can’t understand how, in my own state, which we were fighting for, we are attacked by fellow citizens.”

In just the last 10 days, international monitors recorded 10 grenade attacks, beatings and other acts of harassment in and around the Cazin area. In one attack, an 8-year-old girl lost her legs when explosives were thrown into her home.

Here in Cazin, long a predominantly Muslim town, banners for the ruling party are stretched across most roads with unmistakable slogans: “One more voice for SDA, one less enemy for Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Another declares voting for the SDA to be a pillar of Islam.

Mosques are being used for political, pro-SDA proselytizing, said several opposition residents of Cazin. It was in Cazin that thugs stormed an opposition rally earlier this summer and beat up former Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic, who has split with Izetbegovic and is now running for president for the Bosnia-Herzegovina Party, which espouses multiethnic views and includes non-Muslims.

At Avdo Sepic’s house in Cazin, Delalic showed a reporter the grenade damage. Sepic’s 75-year-old mother plodded by, a stooped woman dressed in the scarf and baggy skirt typical of rural Muslim women.

“Look,” Delalic said, “a true Muslim woman. But she doesn’t want Iran’s Islam. She wants something else.”

Sepic’s wife panicked at such talk. “Don’t say that!” she hissed. “They’ll only make it worse.”

Western officials say much of the intimidation is the work of Bosnia’s secret police service, known since the start of the year as the Agency for Investigation and Documentation. North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops caught its agents working with Iranian nationals on assassination techniques earlier this year, but the organization continues to operate despite U.S. protest.

Indeed, in many regions of Bosnia the police work closely with the SDA and are responsible for some of the harassment and the fact that few cases are adequately investigated or resolved, international monitors said.

Last week, for example, police in Bihac confiscated 5,000 campaign leaflets and 300 posters from an opposition political coalition, noting in their report that the material was inflammatory “against the leading party.”

Outraged international election officials complained, and Sarajevo officials, more attuned to public image, instructed the Bihac police to return the items. But by then, most of the posters and leaflets had already been destroyed.

U.N. police officials, however, have secured a promise from Bihac authorities that the Cazin police chief and head of investigations will be replaced following the flurry of attacks in Cazin.

At Sunday’s U.N. police meeting in Bihac, Fitzgerald told the regional interior minister, Edham Veladzic, and other local police commanders that the lack of public trust in their forces had to be changed.

Inexplicably, by the end of the meeting, Fitzgerald and his associates were actually thanking Veladzic for his cooperation--even as he told them that he would not guarantee the safety of some political opponents, such as Abdic.

Veladzic, an SDA militant, apparently felt he had dodged the bullet. “This [meeting] shows I am totally right,” he later told reporters.