#24/09/1996 10: 37

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric-Zimonjic and Jim Clark

BELGRADE/SARAJEVO, Sep 24 1996 (IPS) - The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is under increasing pressure from Bosnian Serbs threatening to undermine a fragile election process devised by the West to try and keep the war-torn state together.

But the European security organisation is finding it hard work trying to uphold the credibility of the election process it is overseeing in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Assailed by critics for rushing through a flawed system to meet an impossible deadline, then accused of partiality or ineffectuality — the agency is now having its basic figures contested by Bosnian and foreign observers alike.

Bosnian Serb leader Biljana Plavsic, who has made no secret of her desire to resist the OSCE and separate the self-declared Bosnian Serb statelet from the rest of the country, has upped the pace of her sides’s ongoing criticism of the election process.

She said Monday that she was reserving her support for follow up municipal elections in the Serbian entity, the Republika Srpska (RS). She wants answers to questions surrounding the vote counting and electoral registers used during the Sep. 14 national elections.

“We still don’t know if the Republika Srpska, and myself personally will withdraw the signature which handed over powers to the OSCE as regards their assistance for the upcoming municipal elections,” she told reporters here.

The OSCE announced Saturday that municipal elections, delayed because of massive fraud in voter registration, they say primarily by Bosnian Serbs, will now be held between Nov. 22-24.

But the OSCE has also admitted that is having to review the Sep. 14 election tallies after “serious mistakes” were made in adding it up, including the double entry of returned ballots. Independent monitors say that the given figures added up — to them — to an impossible turnout of about 103.9 percent on Sep.14.

The Sep. 14 elections left the Bosnian Serbs’ sworn enemies from the Bosnian Muslim community in strong positions in new post-war government bodies, despite years of savage programmes of ‘ethnic cleansing’ to drive Bosnian Muslim and Croats off their lands.

The country has been divided into a Serbian 49 percent, the Republika Srpska, and a Bosnian Muslim-Croat Federation covering the rest. Under a complex deal established at the Dayton peace talks last year the two sides get their own parliaments and presidents, topped by joint authorities headed by a tripartite presidency and a joint House of Representatives.

In the RS a third of the seats in the Bosnian Serb parliament will go to Bosnian Muslim members, largely elected by refugee Muslims voting by absentee ballot or bussed in to their home villages for the day to vote under NATO guard.

Of the 14 members of the nationwide House of Representatives of Bosnia-Hercegovina to come from the Bosnian Serb territory, three will be from a Muslim party, likely to side with the 28 members from the Muslim-Croat Federation.

Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic took the chairmanship of the tripartite presidency of the country, knocking a Serb into second place.

After the OSCE’s re-tally, Izetbegovic kept his place as chair of the joint presidency. He received 731,024 votes, about 34,000 more than his closest rival, Bosnian Serb Momcilo Krajisnik. According to an earlier tally, Izetbegovic was placed just 29,000 votes ahead of Krajisnik. To their dismay, the Bosnian Serb vote was seriously split by a rival Serb candidate on Sep. 14.

The OSCE in Bosnia-Hercegovina have said the final results will not be delivered until the coming weekend, after new counting of votes for some posts and rechecking of computer lists, votes and statistics.

This followed a report by the London-based International Crisis Group (ICG) which said that the turnout figure for Sep. 14 vote was “improbably high”.

According to the study, turnout among Serbs was 98.5 percent, while the Muslims’ turnout was over the maximum at 103.1 percent. Bosnian Croat turnout on the other hand, was high, “but not improbable,” at 79.3 percent, according to the ICG, which is headed by former U.S. congressman George Mitchell.

“In former totalitarian regimes these sorts of figures would not have been unusual. However, we know that nothing like that total voting population actually voted,” Sir Terence Clark of the ICG told journalists in Sarajevo over the weekend.

ICG based its figures, Clark said, using “extremely conservative” estimates of the numbers of the electorate known not to have voted. Subtracting this number — some half a million people — from the estimated maximum number of voters for each ethnic group, it made a comparison with the returned ballots.

Thus, some 1,141,656 Moslems were said to have voted in the poll though the maximum theoretical Moslem electorate ICG has calculated was 1,106,914. In other words, the turnout was 103.1 percent.

For Bosnia as a whole, the comparative figures according to ICG are a maximum of 2,341,100 voters from all three factions, a figure which contrasts with the 2,431,554 ballots cast. Turnout comes to 103.9 percent with these figures.

The original base electorate figures come from a pre-war census and U.N. calculations of Bosnia’s population, dispersed around Bosnia-Hercegovina and 55 other countries. This dispersed electorate was put at 2,9 million by the U.N. and OSCE.

But Jeff Fischer, director general of OSCE for the Bosnian elections, admitted to the Belgrade independent daily Nasa Borba that in practical terms, “the total number of those who had the right to vote was not known”.

OSCE official Nicole Szulc said its experts were examining their figures in view of the ICG report. “We take these allegations very seriously. Clearly something’s wrong somewhere,” she said.

ICG deputy director John Fawcett said: “To put these figures into context, turnout in the 1990 elections was 74.4 percent when only 2.33 million voted”. The first multiparty elections in Bosnia were held in 1990, before tens of thousands of war casualties and the displacement of 1.5 million people.

And Clark warned that municipal elections planned for November would have no credibility unless the OSCE overhauled registration procedures for refugees abroad and corrected voter lists in Bosnia- Hercegovina.