Bosnia Goes to Polls 3rd Time Since War

Bosnia’s Muslim majority rallied behind a multiethnic party of moderates in elections Saturday, while hard-line nationalists remained strong among ethnic Serbs and Croats.

The first official results from the vote are not expected until today, but early returns this morning showed strong gains for reformist Zlatko Lagumdzija’s Social Democratic Party in the Muslim-Croat Federation, which makes up just over half of Bosnia.

In the Bosnian Serb republic, early returns showed Mirko Sarovic of the hard-line Serbian Democratic Party--founded by indicted war crimes suspect and fugitive Radovan Karadzic--far ahead of Western-backed Prime Minister Milorad Dodik in the presidential race.

But complicated new voting rules in Republika Srpska, as the Serbian sector is known, could still deny the nationalists victory.

A final vote count in the general election is not expected before Friday, said Robert Barry, the American head of the Bosnian mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

“Having had some experience lately in my country, the United States, I would not be so rash as to tell you all the ballots will be counted,” Barry said, alluding to the continuing dispute over the U.S. presidential election.

About 2.5 million Bosnians were eligible to vote in the country’s third general election in only five years, since the Dayton peace accords were signed Nov. 21, 1995, ending 3 1/2 years of war.

The election rules have changed each time, however, and as the confusion mounts among voters, so does the frustration of people faced with unemployment as high as 60% and little sign that things will soon get better.

A common complaint here is that Bosnia has too many politicians and too few jobs.

About 20,000 troops led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization keep the peace in Bosnia, and there has been slow progress in returning hundreds of thousands of refugees to their homes.

But dozens of suspected war criminals still hold positions of power, and the economy is severely drained by official corruption and organized crime.

Deep divisions among most Croats, Muslims and Serbs--and myriad other problems--continue to raise doubts that Bosnia can become a stable, multiethnic democracy able to survive on its own.

In Croat-dominated areas of Bosnia, nationalists from the Croatian Democratic Union, or HDZ, and its allies defied the foreign-run administration Saturday by holding a referendum calling for more control over Croatian affairs. It was seen as the first step toward demands for Croatian autonomy.

The Croatian referendum, which foreign officials called “a political activity [whose] result will have no legal effect,” was conducted in polling booths separate from official voting stations set up for the regular election.

Barry said the vote’s Croatian organizers would be reported to Bosnia’s elections appeals board, made up of foreign and local judges, for a ruling on whether they violated a rule that prohibits campaigning on election day and the previous day.

He specifically accused the HDZ--whose founder, Franjo Tudjman, was president of neighboring Croatia until he died last year, thus allowing a democratic government to take power there.

That government has denounced Tudjman’s destructive nationalism, which helped fuel the war in Bosnia, where Barry said a group of 11 HDZ leaders and their allies were trying to take away people’s democratic rights with a phony referendum.

“I’m a little surprised that a party which has so long expressed its opposition to communism should do something which amounts to accepting the Leninist principle of democratic centralism,” Barry told reporters.

The “referendum” ballot asked voters whether they supported a five-part Sept. 28 declaration by an unofficial Bosnian Croat assembly. One clause asserts that Bosnian Croats need their own political, educational, scientific and other institutions throughout the country “in order to establish sovereign rights.”

Bosnia’s foreign administrators, who routinely order local politicians into line when they refuse to cooperate across ethnic lines, read the Croats’ declaration as a coded demand to split the Muslim-Croat Federation.

That would divide Bosnia into three largely autonomous ministates and probably make it even less viable as a country.

Marko Vukasin, an HDZ official in the hard-line Croatian enclave of Zepce and one of the local organizers of the referendum, said it was a response to new election rules. They are supposed to give Muslim voters more say in who governs Croat-dominated areas.

But Dragan Covic, the HDZ’s vice president, charged that Bosnia’s foreign administrators imposed the changes because they “consciously want to eliminate the HDZ of Bosnia-Herzegovina.” He called that “a flagrant violation of the constitution and Dayton.”

The HDZ tried to win Croatian votes with a billboard campaign that declared the choice was “Self-determination or extermination.”

Bosnia’s election appeals board ruled the slogan illegal because it “fostered ethnic hatred,” and it ordered the party to remove or cover the offending material by Wednesday or face an unspecified punishment.

But many of the offending billboards were clearly visible in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, and in other parts of the country as voters went to the polls.

Bosnian Serb and Croat politicians weren’t the only ones accused of challenging the Dayton accords, which divided the country into the Serbian republic and the Muslim-Croat Federation.

Although they both operate as virtual mini-states, and cooperate only when ordered to by foreign administrators, they are officially called entities. Critics, especially among Bosnia’s Muslim majority, complain that they prevent Bosnia from becoming a united state.

Haris Silajdzic, Bosnia’s wartime foreign minister, also made strong gains after campaigning under the slogan, “It Is Time for Bosnia-Herzegovina Without Entities,” an apparent attack on one of the fundamental compromises that ended the war. But in this case, the election appeals board ruled that the party had not broken any rules.