YUGOSLAVIA: Countdown to The Complex Elections

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric-Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Sep 8 1996 (IPS) - Expectations are high in Bosnia- Hercegovina as the troubled territory prepares for perhaps the most complex elections in the history of Europe, set for Sep. 14.

With the objective of achieving unity in a country torn apart by war and now existing as three ethnically distinct territories, the diplomat in charge on the ground has no illusions about the size of the task ahead.

“Without elections Bosnia has no hope of creating the joint institutions outlined under Dayton to unify the country,” says Robert Frowick, head of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Bosnia mission.

As proclaimed by the international community, the elections will mark a new post-war era, the closing act of the peace process agreed at Dayton last year that stopped the fighting and previsioned the multi-ethnic reconstruction of Bosnia-Hercegovina.

It is this last that most Balkan analysts doubt: five years of wars and hatred in the area will mean the elections will finally confirm the ethnic divisions.

Next Saturday morning from seven a.m. to seven p.m., around 2.9 million Bosnians are expected to vote. It will be their second multi-party elections since 1990. The 4,400 polling stations all over Bosnia will be staffed by 35,000 election workers. About 1,200 OSCE supervisors drawn from 33 countries will oversee the voting and counting processes.

The voters include 1.5 million refugees and displaced persons.

An estimated 641,000 refugee voters dispersed in 55 countries outside Bosnia, began voting on Aug. 28. Deadline for ballots was Sep.3 when the votes were brought to Sarajevo by the OSCE for counting.

Some 300,000 displaced persons from all sides are expected to return to the home areas from which they were driven to vote there on Saturday. They will cross the so-called 1,000 kilometre Inter- Entity Border Lines (IEBL) to face probable hostility from the people who originally drove them out.

Some 1,200 International Police Task Force (IPTF) officers and some 55,000 NATO-led peacekeepers will be on hand to try to ensure there is no trouble at the 19 formal crossings on the IEBL, the supposedly ‘provisional’ demarcation lines between the wartime areas that have become permanent fixtures dividing the country.

At the time of the last census, in April 1991, pre-war Bosnia had 4.3 million people. Some 43.7 percent were Muslims, 31.4 percent Serb and 17.3 Croat. The rest declared themselves as ‘Yugoslavs’ or products of mixed marriages.

The census gave rise to a once famous multi-coloured map showing the diverse distribution of the ethnic groups around the country. Forty three months of war and savage ‘ethnic cleansing’ have turned the country into three zones — the Croat and Muslim sectors, united under a fragile federation, holding 51 percent of the country and the Serbian sector dubbed the ‘Republika Srpska’ (RS) holding the rest.

All citizens aged 18 can vote if their names were on the 1991 census, on which the OSCE drew up its electoral roll.

Each voter will cast four colour-coded ballots. People in the federation will cast grey ballots for cantonal assemblies and orange ballots for the House of Representatives of the Federation. They will use white ballots to vote for a nationwide House of Representatives of the Union of Bosnia-Hercegovina and a gold one to pick two names for the three-seat collective Presidency.

Voters in the Serb RS will cast a blue voting slip for their choice of RS president and an orange one for the RS National Assembly. They will also vote on white papers for the House of Representatives of the Union and on gold slips for one of the three seats on the country’s collective Presidency.

The collective Presidency of Bosnia will consist of one Muslim, one Croat and one Serb. The candidate with the highest number of votes in the presidential contest will serve as Chairman of the Presidency. The Presidency has responsibility for foreign policy, the national annual budget and implementing decisions of the national parliament. It should govern by consensus.

The House of Representatives of the Union of Bosnia-Hercegovina will consist of 42 members, two-thirds of whom will be elected by voters of the Federation and the remainder by residents of the RS.

The new body will serve as a lower house to the upper chamber of the 15-member House of Peoples. Ten will come from the House of Representatives of the Federation and five from the National Assembly of the RS. The two houses will set revenues and expenditure and ratify treaties.

The House of Representatives of the Federation will have 140 members directly elected and will enact the basic laws governing life in its 51 percent of the country. The RS National Assembly’s 140 members also directly elected will do the same for its part.

The Bosnian Serb president will be elected by direct vote and she or he will serve as chief executive. The elections will also decide the membership of 10 cantonal councils in the Federation. The RS has no cantons.

The OSCE says 29 political parties and 3,398 candidates will compete in the elections. There are 17 parties in the Muslim- Croat Federation and 12 in RS.

Counting centres established by local election commissions are responsible for counting the ballots under OSCE supervision.

Preliminary counts will be reported from the local election commissions to OSCE regional centres and from there to the Provisional Election Commission (PEC), the OSCE’s supreme election body. PEC, based in Sarajevo, will report all results, verify whether the elections were valid and certify the results.

OSCE officials say that provisional results could be available by Sep. 16 or 17. Final results might not be available for another week depending on how smoothly the counting goes. OSCE officials say it could take 10 days just to count the 12 million ballots the vote could produce. But by Oct. 14 the joint institutions of Bosnia’s new government should be formed.

Bosnia’s three main nationalist parties will dominate the elections: the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) led by Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic; the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) led by Aleksa Buha (56), who replaced Serb war crimes indictee Radovan Karadzic in July; and the Croat Democratic Union (HDZ) led by Kresimir Zubak (49).

These are the same parties that led Bosnia to war in 1992. The SDA makes some concession to multi-ethnic positions on territorial grounds, but the others are mono-ethnic and do not try to hide it.

In practice, neither OSCE officials nor the analysts hide the feeling that the elections in Bosnia are far from fair and free. They quote the biased media, lack of freedom of movement and the short period since war has stopped as the main obstacles.

“Whatever the parties or the faces in Bosnia are, the people of Bosnia will have not much choice this time” the independent Belgrade daily Nasa Borba commented. “The choice will once again be the nationalists — let us hope this time for the last time.”