Voting to Keep Cities ‘Cleansed’

Just look at the math, says Momcilo Cvjetinovic, local head of the Bosnian Serb political party whose army conquered this once-Muslim town last year.

Thanks to more than 15,000 Serbian refugees who have moved into the deserted apartments of Srebrenica, plus 20,000 who can be bused in from elsewhere, it will be easy to outvote any Muslims who might show up for Saturday’s countrywide elections.

“Use mathematics and you will see they have no chance,” Cvjetinovic explains confidently in his office in Srebrenica City Hall, right next to the office of the appointed Bosnian Serb mayor.

The Muslims here once numbered 28,000. But most were deported. And an estimated 8,000 are dead or missing, many possibly lying in nearby mass graves.

About 150 miles across Bosnia-Herzegovina to the west, Bosnian Croat leaders in Drvar aren’t even bothering with number-crunching.

All sides in the city see victory for the Croatian Democratic Union, the entrenched nationalist party of Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, as a foregone conclusion. Opposition parties haven’t delivered a speech in Drvar, let alone waged a serious campaign.

All but 82 of the 17,000 Bosnian Serbs who once lived in the city fled last year, when the Croatian and Bosnian Croat armies captured the region in a final offensive of the 3 1/2-year Bosnian war. Since then, thousands of Bosnian Croat refugees have moved in.

“Hail Mary, and Christ be with you!” Kresimir Zubak, the party’s presidential candidate, declared at a recent rally. “Let everyone know that in Drvar, you can once again hear the traditional Croatian greeting that mentions Jesus’ name.”

Three and a half years of war have “cleansed” the populations of Srebrenica, Drvar and many other Bosnian towns. Saturday’s elections will give nationalist leaders what they now crave most: a seal of legitimacy for their ethnic engineering. The endorsement will come in the first countrywide voting since an ill-fated referendum on independence from the former Yugoslav federation in 1992 unraveled into civil war.

Bosnians will choose a three-person presidency for the entire nation and executive and legislative leaders for each half. But voters in both towns have been offered little or no choice in the matter. Exhausted, embittered and uninformed, they say their ballots will be cast along strict lines of ethnicity, just as their political leaders have instructed them to do. Serbs will vote for Serbs, Croats for Croats, Muslims for Muslims.

Election rules are stacked against nonconformists: In Serb-controlled Srebrenica, names of Muslim and Croat candidates for president will not appear on the ballot; in Croat-controlled Drvar, Serb names will be missing. And the main ethnic parties so dominate the political landscape that there is little choice even within ethnic groups.

At Drvar City Hall, it is impossible to see through the front window because of campaign posters of one party--the Croatian Democratic Union. Inside, the official city bulletin board is covered with them, as are hallways and the offices of most city officials.

With no Serbs appearing on the ballot, it is unlikely that Serbs still in Drvar will leave their remote hillside homes to vote. Most have been so terrorized by a gang of Croatian youths that they won’t even go to town to collect food handouts.

On a table at Srebrenica City Hall lies a stack of new identity cards for members of one party--the Serbian Democratic Party. Delivered the day before, the cards are signed by Radovan Karadzic, party founder and indicted war crimes suspect who supposedly is banned from public politics.

Karadzic stands accused of genocide in the takeover of the city, which after Saturday’s vote will formally belong to his Bosnian Serb state--and be run by his elected party.

“The lack of real political competition is an obvious concern,” said John Graham, senior elections officer for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which is overseeing the vote. “The objective should be the development of a multi-party system.”

Electoral Chess

Srebrenica is little more than a collection of buildings hugging a hairpin curve in a mountain highway. Cut off and under siege for two years before being overrun by the Bosnian Serb army, the eastern city suffers not so much from war damage as from the tattered devastation of survival.

Surrounding forests have been denuded, and trash is heaped precariously on roadsides. Windowless houses are punctured by artillery fire; there is no sign of the repairs visible elsewhere in Bosnia.

A single bus line connects Srebrenica with other Bosnian Serb cities. There are six working telephones, and running water comes every other day but is not potable.

For Cvjetinovic, the Serbian Democratic Party chieftain, and other politicians, Saturday’s voting will be the strategic final step in jury-rigging a nation. The party, known as SDS, casts itself as the builder of a united Republika Srpska--the Bosnian Serb Republic. Voting for anyone else is unpatriotic.

“It is in our best interest that elections happen normally so that we confirm what we achieved in the war,” said Cvjetinovic, 33, a former high school teacher who was fired from a subsequent job as a radio reporter in 1991, before the war started, when Muslims began to dominate Srebrenica’s government.

“We have to defend our own country so that we can unite with the countries we want to: Serbia, Montenegro [constituents of the rump Yugoslavia], one day maybe Macedonia.”

He drives a black Renault left behind by the single Muslim most hated by Serbs in eastern Bosnia, Nasir Oric. Like Cvjetinovic, Oric is from Srebrenica. He led paramilitary raids into Serbian villages in the early years of the war, killing many Serbs, including Cvjetinovic’s sister.

Confident that Muslim voters will be outnumbered by the new Serbs of Srebrenica, Cvjetinovic said he didn’t even mind if the Muslims came to Srebrenica on election day. But once they cast their ballots, they must leave, he said. They must not try to visit their old homes. Otherwise, he can only predict “incidents.”

“Every Muslim arrival can turn into a big danger for law and order,” he said. “I’ve been warning the international community of that. We have proposed they have their own polling place. There should be one building where the Muslims vote, another building where we vote.”

Politics of Necessity

A lumber town surrounded by forests of fir, juniper and beech, Drvar lies in a shallow valley in the rugged mountains of western Herzegovina. Its main thoroughfare, recently renamed after a Croatian king, is dominated by a hilly park.

Many high-rise apartment buildings survived the war unscathed, and those that did not have been ransacked by refugees and looters looking for appliances, clothing and other valuables.

The Serbian Orthodox church occupies a prominent position near the center of town, but aside from its overgrown lawn and boarded-up doors, it has not been touched. A youth club next door has been converted into a Roman Catholic church, with the basketball court serving as a sanctuary and the chess rooms as a center for humanitarian aid.

Not long ago, schoolchildren in the former Yugoslav federation visited the town in droves. Above the modest skyline, nestled in the rocky face of a mountain, is a cave where Communist fighter Josip Broz Tito is said to have eluded Nazi invaders during World War II. Tito went on to lead Yugoslavia for more than three decades, and during that time, the town was officially known as Titov Drvar.

Today no one speaks of that history, preferring instead to remind visitors that Croats lived in Drvar as recently as 1941, when the Roman Catholic church was razed and its priest killed. The history lesson is meant in part to justify the renewed Croatian claim to the town, but also to provide a common grounding for the stream of disenchanted refugees filling its abandoned houses and apartments.

“You know how it is in Bosnia,” said Marcel Zuljic-Suljuzovic, the appointed deputy mayor, whose family moved 13 times during the recent war while he fought in the trenches. “We all trace our history as far as it serves our needs at the moment.”

An estimated 5,000 Croats from 42 towns, most of them in Muslim-controlled central Bosnia, began resettling in Drvar in October, when fires still smoldered in buildings and confused farm animals roamed the streets. For some, the apartments assigned to them by municipal authorities were their first real homes in four years, gloomy but secure.

The path to permanent shelter was cleared by the Croatian and Bosnian Croat armies, both with strong links to the Croatian Democratic Union, or HDZ. About 2,500 Bosnian Croat soldiers are still deployed in the town; many have moved their families there. They remain fiercely loyal to the HDZ, and their presence looms over the town like a thick fog.

If for no other reason than political expediency and indebtedness, no one in Drvar contemplates breaking with the HDZ. Ask residents what party they support, and they reflexively--but passionately--recite the HDZ election slogan: “It is clear.”

“If you have been bitten by a snake, you are afraid when you see a salamander,” said Janja Martinovic, 43, a mother of two standing in the cold rain at the recent HDZ rally. “We don’t know much about politics, but we know what we have to do.”

Voter Fatigue

If politicians see strategy in the elections, others look for hope and stability. For many in both Srebrenica and Drvar, the elections are secondary only to the basics of survival and recovery.

“Everybody is hoping the elections will make things better, make all this stop,” said Miroslav Kapetanovic, a refugee in Srebrenica from the Sarajevo suburb of Ilijas. “The war is over, but there is still too much tension. Everybody wants to go back to our old standard of living. Doors used to be open to us. We could go anywhere we wanted. Now all doors are closed for Serbs.”

Kapetanovic and his family fled their little farm outside Sarajevo early this year, just before the town was transferred from Serbian to Muslim-Croat control as part of the 1995 Dayton, Ohio, peace agreement’s attempt to reunify the Bosnian capital.

He came to Srebrenica because its homes, unlike most available housing, still had roofs. He works 15 hours a day, tending a small grocery store, for $65 a month. Beer seemed to be the biggest-selling item on a recent morning, when three men seated outside his shop were well into their fourth round.

Unlike the hard-line Serbian nationalists, Kapetanovic, 37 and a father of two, is willing to live in a union called Bosnia-Herzegovina--as long as the Bosnian Serbs’ Republika Srpska enjoys autonomy.

“We can live next to each other but not together. Maybe our children will be able to live together one day, but not us, not now. With so much bloodshed, so many dead. . . . The war did its job. It was all politics--politics that I could not influence.”

He will hold his nose and vote for the SDS, he said, because he has not seen a better alternative. “The best would be not to vote at all, but the Muslims will vote, and if we don’t vote, then they’d [outvote] us. And to have their authorities here? To be ruled by the one I was fighting against? No, no. It’s too early for that.”

The Sarajevo refugees were the last wave to be resettled in Srebrenica, following earlier forced exoduses of Serbs fleeing Muslim-Croat offensives in Glamoc, Drvar and other parts of western and northwestern Bosnia.

Mira Bundelo, an engineer working as a secretary, escaped her home in Bosanska Krupa when it fell to Muslim-Croat forces last September. She took refuge with her family in a single room in Sanski Most; then, that city also fell, on an afternoon when she was visiting the town of Prijedor. Unable to rescue her belongings, she continued to hopscotch eastward across Serb-held Bosnia until winding up in Srebrenica.

Here, her family occupied an apartment that was filthy and had been stripped of its plumbing and fixtures after the several Muslim families living there were expelled. Her husband has yet to find a job. Like many in Srebrenica, she looks to the elections as a turning point that must force authorities to become responsible and responsive.

“I don’t know what will happen, but things must change,” said Bundelo, a serious woman in her late 30s. “We’ve had four years of a kind of uncertainty. We are in limbo. People must work again.”

Uncertainty haunts the people of Drvar too.

Father Kazimir Visaticki, the Drvar parish priest, was near tears. A desperate woman with three small children had just arrived in town and needed a stove to heat her apartment. The church had given away the last one a week earlier. He had a waiting list of 12 shivering families.

Visaticki was tempted to hand over his own stove, but then realized he would be of little use to the 1,722 families who turn every month to his Catholic church for food, clothing and other relief. He wrote down the woman’s name and politely turned her away; two days later, he said, he still could not get her out of his mind.

Outside, the sound of axes splitting wood filled the cool September air. Drvar is a lumber town, but there is a frantic shortage of firewood. Few people can afford to hire a truck to haul logs from the mountains. Elderly refugees cannot muster the strength to chop them. Residents who do manage to stockpile wood find it has been stolen overnight.

“I am really worried,” said Visaticki, himself a refugee from a Serb-controlled village near Banja Luka. “There is not enough food, there is not enough clothing and there is not enough firewood. And people keep pouring into town every day.”

Will the elections help?

Visaticki winces. He does not want to talk politics. A parade of HDZ politicians visited him just before their rally in Drvar.

“They just wrote down my problems the same way you are doing,” Visaticki tells a reporter. “But I need concrete assistance. When people first started coming here, there were still pigs and cows around. They had meat to eat. Now there is nothing.”

Mara Lukic, a 45-year-old cleaning woman in the church, says most people are too busy making ends meet to pay much attention to the elections.

She and her family live on the ground floor of a two-story house. Her husband, a miner before the war, was so badly beaten by a mob of Muslim soldiers that he is an invalid; his parents were left behind in their village to die. The older of their two daughters helps pay the bills by baby-sitting, but they barely scrape by each month.

Lukic walked two miles, nonetheless, to attend the HDZ rally, the first and only campaign event in Drvar. Aside from the well-known Croatian musicians it featured, the rally was a source of political stability in a world that otherwise offers little, she said.

“We want to know that we can really stay here and make it our home,” said Lukic, a toothless smile attesting to the hardships of the last few years. “I don’t feel at ease living in someone else’s house. I would prefer a tent if I could call it my own.”

Democracy at Work

Zdravko Josipovic is running the elections in Drvar. He spent long hours attending seminars, sponsored by Western governments and international organizations, that taught him how to register voters, assign them precincts and ensure things run smoothly on election day.

It was all very interesting, Josipovic says, but not particularly enlightening.

“I can’t put my finger on anything that we are doing now that would be considered more democratic than the way we used to do things,” said Josipovic, a lanky and gregarious attorney who worked on elections before the breakup of the former Yugoslav federation. “The basic voter lists were actually better organized before.”

The similarities with elections past--when one party ruled all of Yugoslavia--run deep. Josipovic knows it. City officials know it. Even people on the street know it.

“These elections are just a formal thing. Everything has been decided,” said Jozo Maric, 32, an HDZ loyalist who flies a Republic of Croatia flag over his cafe on Drvar’s main street. “We remember the days of predetermined elections, and this is no different. This is not democracy.”

As in the old days, Maric and others note, there is an information void concerning opposition activities.

International election officials say there are four parties competing for seats in the cantonal assembly that will represent the region encompassing Drvar, but no one in town seems to know about them.

Josipovic, the elections chief, said he has only heard rumors of challengers to HDZ candidates, while Jadranka Garic, who runs the only media organization in town--the city-funded Croatian Radio Drvar--said her station is not interested in the cantonal races.

“We didn’t interview anyone, and didn’t feel we needed to,” said Garic, 39, editing news reports from the Herceg-Bosna News Agency, a nationalist Croatian wire service. “We have read all the press statements from the OSCE on the air. I think our part in the preelection effort has been quite good.”

Garic also works part time for the only newspaper that regularly covers the Drvar region, a paper based across the border in the Croatian port of Split, about 60 miles to the south. In a story concerning the HDZ rally, Garic reported a crowd of 5,000 supporters, the equivalent of every Drvar resident not in military uniform. U.N. police, who monitored the rally, estimated the gathering at one-fifth that size.

“Some people walk around their apartments holding their radios in every possible position just trying to pick up Radio Zagreb [broadcasting from the Croatian capital],” said Ivan Kasapovic, a watch repairman who was among the first refugees to settle in Drvar. “I have also heard about a station that is supposed to be good--Radio Free Europe--but I have not been able to get it. I miss being able to hear all the possible points of view.”

Opposition parties--all Serbian--exist in Srebrenica. They have been given small offices on the third floor of a ransacked building that used to house Communist party organizations. Getting heard, however, is next to impossible. None of the parties has a telephone, and there is no television reception in all of Srebrenica, even when there is electricity.

The best organized group of the opposition, the Socialist Party of Republika Srpska, has had a hard time of it. The party’s campaign has consisted of two hourlong interviews on programs at the local radio station--air time shared with several other parties. In a city where Karadzic posters stare down from many walls, residents’ reception has been hostile.

“We are portrayed [by the ruling SDS] as the ones who would bring the Muslims back,” said Branislav Gojkovic, a worried-looking refugee from Lukavac who took charge of the socialist party when it formed in Srebrenica seven months ago.

Gojkovic accused the SDS of some of the same strong-arm tactics employed by all of Bosnia’s ethnic-based nationalist parties. The SDS has offered jobs in exchange for party loyalty and fired some socialist sympathizers, Gojkovic said.

“So far,” he said hopefully, “none of us was physically attacked.”

Murphy reported from Drvar, Wilkinson from Srebrenica.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

BACKGROUND

The U.S.-brokered peace agreement drafted in Dayton, Ohio, late last year stopped a vicious 43-month war over Bosnia-Herzegovina’s right to secede from the former Yugoslav federation. The accord divided Bosnia into two almost equal halves: Republika Srpska--the Bosnian Serb Republic--and the Muslim-Croat federation. It also ushered in 60,000 NATO-led peacekeeping troops, nearly a third of them American, and set nationwide elections for no later than Sept. 14, when Bosnians will choose a three-person presidency for the entire nation plus executive and legislative leaders for each half. Crucial local elections have been postponed because of irregularities in voter registration.