Nationalists Post Strongest Showings in Bosnia Election

Despite a Western strategy of aiding moderate candidates and removing extremists, Bosnian voters largely stayed true to ethnic divisions in elections earlier this month, results released Friday show.

Western officials trying to transform Bosnia-Herzegovina into a multiethnic democracy took solace from the gains that some moderates posted.

But Muslim, Serbian and Croatian leaders and parties appealing to nationalist passions still had the strongest showing in Bosnia’s second general election since the end of its 3 1/2-year war in 1995.

Their share of the vote continues to drop, however, “and that is a positive trend,” said Carlos Westendorp, the Spanish diplomat who effectively runs Bosnia by imposing decisions on the country’s elected leaders.

“The more extreme nationalistic parties are decreasing,” Westendorp told reporters Friday, three days after the results from the Sept. 12-13 elections were supposed to be announced. “The monopoly of the three ethnic parties is decreasing.”

In Washington, Robert Gelbard, the Clinton administration’s point man on Bosnia, asserted that the elections were a victory for the West and for the cause of ethnic pluralism despite hard-liner Nikola Poplasen’s victory over the West’s favorite candidate, incumbent Biljana Plavsic, in the race for the presidency of the Bosnian Serb entity.

“Except for Plavsic, every other race turned out exactly as we would want,” Gelbard told a news conference at the State Department.

The election’s foreign supervisors worked to marginalize extremists with a combination of campaign advice for moderates, rewards of development aid and steps to silence hard-line propaganda in the media.

When that didn’t work, candidates who broke the rules by stirring up ethnic hatred or urging violence, for instance, were simply struck from the ballot. That happened to almost 70 of the 6,000 candidates.

Ultranationalist Poplasen was not knocked off the ballot and went on to win. Poplasen becomes the president of Republika Srpska, the Serbian entity that controls 49% of Bosnia under the U.S.-backed peace accords.

Poplasen’s Serbian Radical Party campaigned for unity with a “Greater Serbia” centered in Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital--a stand that violates the peace accords. He also is closely allied with wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who has gone into hiding to avoid arrest on war crimes charges.

Poplasen, who has promised Westendorp that he will abide by the peace agreement despite his campaign rhetoric attacking its basic principles, took about 44% of the vote in Republika Srpska. His closest rival, reformed nationalist Plavsic, ended up with 40%.

But another Bosnian Serb hard-liner, Momcilo Krajisnik, lost his seat on Bosnia’s three-person presidency, removing a Karadzic ally whom Westendorp blamed for blocking progress.

Krajisnik’s 45% of the vote made him a close second to the more moderate Zivko Radisic, who polled 51% and has Western backing as a Plavsic ally.

Polling figures suggest that Muslim voters may have made the difference for Radisic because of a quirk of Bosnia’s election rules designed to counter the effects of “ethnic cleansing.” Because well over a million Bosnians still have not returned to homes they were forced to flee during the war, they can choose to vote in areas where they no longer live.

The absentee Muslim vote is one possible explanation for the election of a moderate to the seat reserved for a Serb on Bosnia’s presidency at the same time voters chose an extremist to lead Republika Srpska.

Alija Izetbegovic, one of the Bosnian Muslims’ wartime leaders, won another landslide in the poll for the Muslim seat in the presidency. Izetbegovic, who is seen as one of several leaders stalling progress on the return of war refugees, took 87% of the vote.

The Croatian seat on the presidency went to Ante Jelavic, leader of Bosnia’s Croat Democratic Union, which is closely linked to the hard-line nationalists ruling neighboring Croatia. Jelavic polled 53% of the ballots.

Even though staunch nationalists still dominate the Bosnian presidency, Westendorp insisted that he expects he’ll have an easier job getting the three men to work together.

“The central institutions are going to be improved by the results of this election--clearly improved,” Westendorp said.

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Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.