Bosnian Serb Vote Will Show if U.S. Efforts to Boost Karadzic Foe Paid Off

The U.S.-led campaign to boost Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic over hard-line rivals was put to the test over the weekend in high-stakes elections that will shape the course of peacekeeping in Bosnia.

Two days of voting for a new parliament in Republika Srpska, the Serb-controlled half of Bosnia-Herzegovina, ended Sunday afternoon. Partial, unofficial counts showed Plavsic winning in her stronghold city, Banja Luka, but well behind in eastern cities under her opponents’ control.

Plavsic’s newly formed political party, the National Serbian Alliance, faced an uphill struggle against the highly organized supporters of Radovan Karadzic, an indicted war crimes suspect and her predecessor. Official results were not expected for days.

Defeat for Plavsic would represent a devastating blow for Washington, which has invested much--financially and politically--in her quest to take power from Karadzic. The U.S. and its allies want to break the grip of Karadzic’s Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), which they accuse of systematically blocking peacetime reforms.

Nowhere is the power struggle more stark than here in Bijeljina, the Bosnian Serbs’ principal commercial center and gateway to neighboring Yugoslavia--and the largest city not to have joined Plavsic’s camp.

“Bijeljina is the fulcrum,” one European diplomat said.

In the weeks leading up to the vote, opposition politicians in Bijeljina reported harassment, death threats and other forms of intimidation. Defectors from Karadzic’s party who sided with Plavsic were fired from their jobs. Four members of the opposition Democratic Party were jailed on what their associates said were trumped-up terrorism charges.

In the predawn darkness of Nov. 13, masked gunmen hurled tear gas and fired nearly 100 rounds of ammunition at the local offices of Plavsic’s party. Two security guards inside escaped injury in the attack, which was condemned by senior international officials as “disturbing.” Bullet holes in the wall frame a portrait of Plavsic.

“This has been a campaign in an atmosphere of threats, fear and violence,” said Branko Todorovic, head of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Republika Srpska, which is based in Bijeljina.

“This is a life-and-death struggle for the SDS. It is not simply a political contest. So they are using all means available,” Todorovic said.

Worried Plavsic supporters predicted disaster if the SDS and its more extremist allies, the Serbian Radical Party, win a majority of the 83 parliamentary seats at stake. They say that opposition politics would be strangled once and for all; Plavsic would be marginalized and stripped of authority; and Republika Srpska would be more deeply divided.

The hard-liners see things differently. They have appealed to the Bosnian Serbs’ sense of patriotism to turn out their supporters, portraying Plavsic as a “foreign mercenary” and branding the weekend vote “elections under occupation”--a reference to the presence in Bosnia of more than 30,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led peacekeepers.

“Mrs. Plavsic winning is science fiction,” the Bijeljina police chief, Branko Stejvic, declared as he met with other SDS leaders in party headquarters.

“The West invested a lot in her, but it will backfire,” agreed Sava Ceklic, a teacher and party official.

Western officials concede that if Plavsic fares badly, their efforts to enforce the U.S.-brokered Bosnian peace accords will be made more difficult by an emboldened hard-line parliament. Two years after the U.S.-backed accords were signed, international officials are looking for new ways to force compliance.

In addition to the millions of dollars in U.S. aid that have flowed her way, Plavsic’s new party has received coaching from U.S. advisors who suggested that she limit rallies and focus on smaller, “theme-oriented” meetings with voters.

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Still, the Plavsic campaign seemed lackluster and failed to ignite great enthusiasm among voters.

“They [SDS leaders] have done all they could to label us traitors,” said Svetozar Mihajlovic, a leading candidate in Bijeljina for Plavsic’s party. “Every day, people have been bombed with ‘Traitor, traitor, traitor.’ A lot of Serbs believe it is better to live in difficult circumstances than to betray your people. We try to explain that the traitors are those who would doom Republika Srpska to isolation. But I am not sure the people understood.”

Plavsic was in the unenviable position of having to strike a balance between saying the right things to please international officials and appealing to the fervent nationalist sentiments of her domestic voting audience.

At her disposal was the Republika Srpska state television network, which came under Plavsic’s control after NATO seized transmitters being used by the Karadzic faction and turned them over to her. But by all accounts, the new Serbian Radio and Television network is not yet up to the task of changing hearts and minds.

Worse still for Plavsic’s cause has been the ability of Karadzic allies to return to the airwaves through local stations that broadcast from Bijeljina to several other towns. Two nights before the elections, the broadcast ran a three-hour interview with the region’s most notorious Serbian ultranationalist, Vojislav Seselj.

Seselj, the top vote-getter in recent, inconclusive presidential elections in Serbia, attacked Plavsic as a “senile grandmother” who is sacrificing the Serbs to Americans, Muslims and Croats. He used the air time to advocate Republika Srpska’s secession from Bosnia and union with Yugoslavia, language that violates the Dayton accords.

International officials said Sunday night that they were aware of the Bijeljina broadcasts but could not stop them.

Preliminary vote counts late Sunday showed Plavsic’s party in third place in Bijeljina, with the SDS and Radicals taking more than 50% of the vote.