Bosnian Serb Vote Splits Parliament

Voters in the Serb-run half of this country have turned ever so slightly away from Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb warlord and indicted war crimes suspect, in elections that also showed how divided the Serbs have become.

Preliminary results Tuesday from a two-day parliamentary vote over the weekend indicated that the new government of Republika Srpska will be fragmented and prone to stalemate. “It will be, basically, a hung parliament,” said an international official who has analyzed the results.

The division means Karadzic’s hard-liners can no longer dominate the Bosnian Serb government with the same impunity they have enjoyed for the last two years--a period they used to obstruct Western efforts to impose peacetime reforms.

But with no party winning an absolute majority in the 83-seat legislature, getting anything done with the new government may prove equally complicated.

The election was the first formal gauging of the political strength of Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic, whom Washington and its European allies have backed in her power struggle with predecessor Karadzic. U.S. and other Western officials consider Plavsic to be more cooperative, despite her own nationalistic leanings, in adhering to the Dayton peace accords that ended Bosnia’s war two years ago.

Unofficial results released Tuesday by the Bosnian Serb electoral commission show Plavsic’s newly formed political party, the National Serbian Alliance, taking roughly 20% of the vote. Karadzic’s Serbian Democratic Party, or SDS, the nationalistic party that ruled the Bosnian Serbs through 3 1/2 years of war and since, received almost 33% of the vote.

Karadzic’s followers are likely to stake out continued power by forming a coalition with the extremist Serbian Radical Party, which was finishing neck and neck with Plavsic’s party. Like the SDS, the Radicals advocate final partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina, with the Republika Srpska uniting with neighboring Serbia.

If the combined vote of the SDS and the Radicals tops 50%, where it appears to be headed, their coalition will be able to outvote Plavsic and her followers routinely and undermine her authority.

Plavsic is likely to receive some help from the Bosnian Serb Socialist Party, which was finishing fourth with about 12% of the vote. The two parties, despite basic ideological differences, may be willing to form an alliance.

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International supervisors of the election refused Tuesday to confirm tallies announced by local authorities. These results do not take into account the absentee vote--roughly 12% of the total, including ballots cast by Muslims and Croats expelled by Serbs from territory now controlled by the Serbs. Their vote would tend to take seats away from hard-line Serbian nationalists.

Plavsic’s failure to break the hard-line hold on power would be a major embarrassment to the United States, which has invested millions of dollars and NATO’s reputation in supporting the Bosnian Serb president’s efforts.

The dispute between the factions surrounding Plavsic and Karadzic has riven Republika Srpska and paralyzed international officials’ peacemaking duties. Election results so far may not change that impasse, officials said.

“I cannot foresee that the rift can be healed,” said German diplomat Hans Schumacher, a senior official with the lead peace-implementing agency. “The only hope we have is that the result of these elections will present us with a constructive counterpart with whom we can cooperate on the basis of [the peace agreement]. We maintain the hope that [voters] have cast ballots to take themselves out of the doldrums and not further into the abyss.”