Bosnian Vote a Setback for Democracy

Defying foreign pressure, voters from all three of Bosnia’s ethnic groups have given strong support in general elections to hard-line nationalists.

The first official results from Saturday’s vote left foreign observers here shaking their heads at the setback to efforts to build a stable, multiethnic democracy. The reversal came nearly five years after the peace accords reached in Dayton, Ohio, on Nov. 21, 1995.

“It’s a catastrophe,” said American analyst James Lyon, who heads the watchdog International Crisis Group here. “If these election results hold in roughly the same percentages, the international community is really in trouble.”

With about a third of the ballots counted, the extreme nationalist Serbian Democratic Party, or SDS, appeared set to win the presidency of Bosnia’s Serbian sector. The SDS, founded 10 years ago by Radovan Karadzic, now an indicted war crimes suspect, also led the vote for the territory’s parliament. It benefited from the long-standing support of Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica, who overthrew Slobodan Milosevic in a popular uprising Oct. 5.

SDS leader Mirko Sarovic won 47.9% of the ballots counted as of Monday. The Western-backed moderate Bosnian Serb prime minister, Milorad Dodik, who suffered from widespread accusations of corruption, received 31.3% in the preliminary results.

U.S. Ambassador Thomas Miller made it clear during the campaign that Bosnian Serbs risked losing tens of millions of dollars in aid if they voted for the nationalists.

Trend Likely to Hold, a U.S. Analyst Says

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is overseeing Bosnia’s elections, said it expected the results to “change significantly” as more ballots are counted. The final ballot count is not expected until Friday at the earliest. But based on previous Bosnian elections, Monday’s preliminary results indicated a firm trend that was likely to hold, Lyon said.

Since the war ended in 1995, Bosnia-Herzegovina has been divided into two entities--the Bosnian Serb republic and the Muslim-Croat Federation. In the federation, which makes up just over half of Bosnia, the moderate and multiethnic Social Democratic Party was faring much worse than foreign administrators had hoped.

Instead of emerging as the single strongest party in the federation, the Social Democrats were running third behind the nationalist Croatian Democratic Union, or HDZ, and the Muslim nationalist Party for Democratic Action, or SDA.

Political leader Haris Silajdzic, Bosnia’s wartime foreign minister and a prominent critic of Western governments’ failure to deliver on promises enshrined in the Dayton peace accords, made strong gains in the election.

In an interview, Silajdzic wouldn’t say whether he was willing to form a coalition between his Party for Bosnia-Herzegovina and his former SDA party, which, based on the results so far, could join with Croatian nationalists to form a government.

Bosnia’s dysfunctional democracy has reduced Muslims, who are the single largest ethnic group, to arguing over limited power in a small part of their country because the results of Milosevic’s “ethnic cleansing” campaign still hold, Silajdzic said.

“Bosnia-Herzegovina is divided on an ethnic basis, which was exactly the plan of Mr. Milosevic and the regime in Belgrade,” he said, referring to the capital of Yugoslavia and of its main republic, Serbia.

Bosnia’s foreign administrators have accused hard-line nationalists among the Croats, Muslims and Serbs of obstructing refugee returns. The majority by far of more than 1 million refugees waiting to go home consists of Muslims, undermining the Dayton accords, which were based on a pledge to reverse “ethnic cleansing.”

Silajdzic complained that Bosnian Serbs and Croats are blocking unification of the country.

The Croats’ HDZ was founded by neighboring Croatia’s late President Franjo Tudjman, whose hard-line regime was replaced by moderate democrats earlier this year. Western governments hoped that the new moderation would spill over into Bosnian Croat territories, but the opposite appears to be happening.

Bosnian Croat Critical of Foreign Officialdom

If the current voting trend continues, the HDZ will end up as the largest single party in Bosnia’s Muslim-Croat Federation.

Ante Jelavic, an HDZ leader who holds the Croats’ seat in Bosnia’s three-member presidency, launched strident attacks on the country’s foreign administration and held an unauthorized referendum that in effect called for Bosnian Croat autonomy.

Wolfgang Petritsch, an Austrian diplomat who runs Bosnia as the international community’s high representative, declined to comment on the preliminary results. But on Nov. 4, just a week before voters went to the polls, Petritsch warned what would happen if the election turned out this way. “Another nationalist win in Bosnia-Herzegovina would only see this potentially rich country isolated politically and economically,” he said.