Day of Reckoning Arrives for Bosnia

Bosnians vote today in their first postwar elections after a campaign marred to the last minute by nationalist rhetoric, appeals to racism and promises of secession.

U.S. officials, who helped broker the peace agreement that paved the way for today’s vote, hope the elections will be a first step in bringing this bitterly divided country together. But most indications are that voting will only cement ethnic partition.

On Friday, the ruling Bosnian Serb political party was punished for repeatedly urging the dissolution of Bosnia-Herzegovina and for declaring Republika Srpska--the Bosnian Serb Republic--an independent and sovereign state.

Biljana Plavsic, the ultranationalist acting president of Republika Srpska and presidential candidate, was ordered by international election supervisors to read an apology on Bosnian Serb television three times before 11 p.m. If she refused, three of the party’s legislative candidates would have been struck from their races.

Plavsic complied, but she didn’t seem to like it. “I’ve received a statement that I have to read,” she told the audience, putting on thick glasses, then reading lines that contradicted most of her entire campaign rhetoric. “The aim of the Serbian Democratic Party, either now or in the future, is not to unite all the Serbs in the Balkans into one single Serbian state,” she read. At that point, she grinned.

The punishment meted out by the election appeals board of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is monitoring the elections, fell far short of its threat earlier in the week to dismiss Plavsic and other Bosnian Serb candidates who continued to advocate secession. And it came too late to have any significant effect.

Plavsic throughout the campaign has ignored the rules and preached the secession of Republika Srpska, which under the Dayton, Ohio, peace accord is recognized as an “entity” on par with the Muslim-Croat federation--envisioned as the two parts of a sovereign Bosnia-Herzegovina.

On Wednesday, within 24 hours of the first OSCE warning, Plavsic told a crowd in the city of Banja Luka: “Our final goal is unification of all Serbs in the Balkans in one joint state. . . . Warfare has to stop in the Balkans. It is not going to stop until the Serbs unite.”

Plavsic was given further warnings in meetings with senior international officials, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander in Bosnia. But at a Thursday night closing rally in Pale, Bosnian Serb headquarters, she only softened her rhetoric.

*

“God has chosen us to fulfill the centuries-old Serbian dream to create on this side of the Drina [River] a Serbian state,” she told a few thousand people who gathered in a muddy field. “You’ve created it. On the 14th of September, defend it.”

Plavsic’s party, which during the 3 1/2-year-long Bosnian war oversaw the expulsion of tens of thousands of Muslims and Croats from Serb-held territory, has also made it clear that it will not allow the return of non-Serbs to its land, another violation of the Dayton accord.

Although the Serbs have been the most consistently blatant, Bosnia’s dominant Muslim and Croatian nationalist parties have similarly used the election campaign to cast themselves as founders and protectors of their state and ethnic identities--making it difficult for a fledgling opposition to make much headway despite support from the West.

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic wrapped up the campaign of his Party of Democratic Action (SDA) on Thursday night with tens of thousands of supporters and curious gathered at a Sarajevo stadium. “Without the SDA, there is no organized Bosniak [Bosnian Muslim] people,” he told a crowd earlier in the week in Tuzla. “Without an organized Bosniak people, there is no Bosnia-Herzegovina. Without SDA, there is no Bosnia-Herzegovina. That’s how it is.”

Izetbegovic is running for the three-person presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which will consist of a Muslim, a Croat and a Serb. A joint parliament will also be elected, and each of the two “entities” will elect other leaders.

In what international officials are calling the most complicated elections this century, tens of thousands of Bosnians are expected to cross ethnic boundary lines to vote. Most will be bused along 19 approved--and heavily guarded--voters routes that connect Muslim-Croat and Serbian lands.

Muslim refugees, who account for the highest number of potential traveling voters, are being discouraged from trying to visit their homes when they return to cities from which they were expelled to cast their ballots. In fact, international officials have set up many polling stations outside disputed cities to keep the Muslims out.