As Bosnia Vote Nears, NATO Braces for Worst

Three thousand Muslim voters are en route to City X in the U.S. sector of Serb-held Bosnia. Angry Serbs await them. U.N. police come to the rescue, but an officer is taken hostage. Shots are fired. An American soldier is down.

What do you do?

This and other scenarios were under review the other day by U.S. Army commanders bracing, with the rest of the international community, for Bosnia-Herzegovina’s first postwar election Sept. 14. Election day is likely to bring violence, and the 60,000-strong NATO-led peacekeeping force, a third of which is American, is working on tricky security plans that try to balance citizens’ right to vote with what the military sees as the need to maintain overall order.

Over the weekend, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization identified 12 potential election-day hot spots in Bosnia--cities where ethnic or political tensions remain high or where it is expected that refugees will try to vote in hometowns now under the control of their wartime enemies.

Three of the sites--Srebrenica, Doboj and Brcko--are in the northeastern sector of Bosnia under U.S. jurisdiction. All were brutally emptied of most of their non-Serbian populations during the war.

For the Americans, self-protection remains the utmost goal--and that means keeping the elections as peaceful as possible. Although insisting that local police and authorities, with U.N. police, take the lead in guaranteeing a safe vote, U.S. and NATO troops will provide overall security, patrol routes to be used by voters and deliver ballots. And they will be on call to put out fires.

“Isolate, isolate, isolate,” U.S. Army Maj. Gen. William Nash told a large gathering of brigade, intelligence, military police and logistics officers at the Tuzla air base during a planning session last week.

If violence such as rioting or a bombing erupts, U.S. troops are supposed to try to contain it, then call in local authorities to assume control. At least those are the instructions from Nash and other senior commanders. Just how successful that approach will be--in a country where local police often instigate rather than prevent trouble--remains to be seen.

But Nash, his senior staff and his brigade commanders from the U.S. Army 1st Armored Division, who have been stationed in this area since NATO deployed them in December, think they can enlist cooperation, especially from Bosnian Serb authorities, with careful political groundwork and “multi-echelon” contacts between now and election day.

To fine-tune their response plans, Nash and his staff walked through scenarios that might be used to stop voters--from a bomb explosion at an election office to the mining of roads. Nash emphasized to a reporter that these all were potential, not expected, events.

As for the 3,000 Muslims headed to City X, the kidnapped U.N. officer and the felled American soldier, Col. John Batiste was in charge.

“We firmly believe we can preclude this,” Batiste told his audience of officers. “It doesn’t have to happen. . . . As long as [the voters] follow [designated] routes, get off their buses, vote and get back on their buses,” the day can advance peacefully, he said.

But if such a situation should occur, Batiste would dispatch a quick-response team with sharpshooters, engineers and military police to the scene, he said, noting: “I would be very disappointed if they don’t return fire and kill whoever fired. I expect a radio call to say, ‘Contact out.’ ”

The designated voters’ routes, on which the U.S. military is so keen, have yet to be fully agreed upon. Like just about every other aspect of election planning, the idea has split the international community.

The U.N. refugee agency, for example, considers designated routes a violation of the freedom of movement guaranteed under last year’s peace accord. Others, like NATO, see them as the only way to maintain order and prevent returning displaced people from trying to visit homes and graveyards.

The extent to which NATO will put down volatile, stick-wielding crowds to let voters reach polls also remains unclear. NATO has preferred to block freedom of movement, usually by Muslims, rather than disperse crowds, saying it is unequipped for riot control.

On Saturday, spokesman British Lt. Col. Max Merriner said in Sarajevo, the capital, that NATO will not “force passage” of voters and suggested that some might be offered alternative voting sites rather than being allowed to go home.

As many as 300,000 Muslim refugees may try to cross Bosnia’s ethnic dividing line to vote in the hometowns from which they were expelled and where displaced Serbs have now been settled.

On Monday, NATO seemed to shift tone by pledging to take a more direct role in assisting voters. Sources involved in daily planning meetings said NATO was responding to pleas from civilian organizations for a more “proactive” stance.

Western assessments have judged violence in the hot spots to be “probable.” But some analysts caution that conflict between Muslim factions or between nominally allied Muslims and Croats may be more likely than the more anticipated Serb-vs.-Muslim antagonism.

Serbs stand to gain the most from successful elections because the voting, as it is structured, will bestow legitimacy on their leadership and its war-long program of forced ethnic segregation.

“The Serbs don’t really want the Muslims coming around [on election day], but if they can just swallow that, they’ll get the results they want,” said a Western analyst in Sarajevo. “They are warning that they can’t guarantee anyone’s safety as a way to scare off as many Muslim voters as possible, and then, come election day, they will behave themselves as best they can.”