Bosnia Election Plumbs the Depth of Separatism

National elections deliver a message. Bosnia’s did: The highest obstacle that the new government will face is the mountain of separatism. No single aspect of Saturday’s voting was more obvious than the determination of all parties--Serb, Muslim and Croat--to gain the biggest possible share of parliamentary power for their ethnic constituents. Tactics ranged from intimidation around the polling centers to demands that ballots be invalidated. Spinmeisters held court long into the evening and continued into the new week.

Few had expected much more from the process. It created a starting point. Not a life was lost. In Bosnia, this is progress. More might come from the renewed diplomacy of American emissary Richard Holbrooke, who last year cajoled, nudged and bullied the various parties to the Bosnian war into a cease-fire and subsequent peace treaty. Holbrooke, now a New York investment banker, is back in the Balkans and claims to have arranged political talks in Paris this weekend between Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim leader, and Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Serbia and godfather of Serbian nationalism in Bosnia. Washington has sufficient clout with these two men to get an attentive hearing. Yet the task for Holbrooke is formidable.

When the votes are finally tallied, when the challenges are reconciled one way or the other, in other words when Bosnia has, on paper, a new federal government, Izetbegovic, Milosevic and the Bosnian Serbs and Croats will have to confront the dark shadows of separatism. They will decide whether there can be a multiethnic Bosnia after the horrors of the past four years or whether the territory will fracture under the weight of nationalist politics.

Frankly, the odds look like a push. Some say the election came too soon, that more political spadework was needed. Much more. But we disagree. For all its faults, the election has served a purpose. It has created a government and, when the tally is completed, the ballots will have filled legislative seats. This is a proper legal framework. What would delay have achieved? That cannot be known, but momentum has a value in diplomacy.

The deputies who sit in the new federal legislature in Sarajevo and their political leaders there in the capital and in Pale, Belgrade and Zagreb will ultimately decide whether Bosnia is a country or an ethnic pie ripe for the slicing. The weekend’s election opened a door, and courageous politicians will step through it.