May 22, 1996

Bosnia Threatens to Withdraw From Elections

By CHRIS HEDGES

ARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- In a new challenge to the American-brokered peace in the former Yugoslavia, the Bosnian government threatened on Tuesday to withdraw from elections unless voting rules were drastically changed and NATO arrested the most prominent Serbian war criminals.

The elections, scheduled for Sept. 14, are designed to underpin a stable democracy here and allow the withdrawal of 60,000 NATO peacekeeping troops. But in an interview on Tuesday, Ejup Ganic, the vice president of the Muslim-led government, said the elections would not be held unless Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, Bosnian Serb leaders indicted for genocide, were removed from power. He also insisted that voting rules be changed to prevent Serbs from gaining electoral control over Muslim towns and villages they seized in the war.

Ganic declared: "We will not participate in these elections unless the rules change. The danger of these elections, if they are not done correctly, is that they will verify ethnic cleansing. They will become a blueprint for how to ethnically expel people."

The elections are intended to play a central role in the reintegration of the Croat, Muslim and Serb entities that now make up Bosnia. Senior Bosian officials say that if the elections lock in the virtual ethnic partition of the country left by the war, renewed fighting is almost certain as displaced Muslims battle to regain their homes.

The need to begin preparing for elections has been the principal obsession of all parties in the civil war here, as well as the international officials trying to hammer this splintered country back together.

The Bosnian Serbs hope the elections will ratify their control over nearly half the country. The Muslim-dominated government wants to use the elections to reassert control over all of Bosnia, and to hold the international overseers here to the stated goal of the Dayton accords, which is to preserve a unified country.

International officials, the United Nations and the United States all say they support the Dayton goal, but have so far been unwilling to risk conflict by removing Karadzic and Mladic, both indicted war criminals who under the accord cannot take part in political life.

The Bosnian government raised its objections on Tuesday with the Swiss foreign minister, Flavio Cotti, the chairman of the Organization of Security and Co-Operation in Europe, the body that must certify whether by July 14 conditions exist for free and fair elections. But the organization's officials said the government did not hand them an ultimatum.

"The Bosnian government expressed these issues as concerns," said Franaz Egle, the spokesman for the Swiss Foreign Ministry, "not as conditions which must be met before participating in the elections."

Still, Cotti and other outside officials have said they agree that fair elections are improbable with Karadzic still in power.

An American official in Washington acknowledged that the elections were "the most important element of implementing the peace plan." He interpreted Ganic's remarks as a bargaining tactic, adding, "I don't believe he's seriously contemplating following through with the threat."

Ganic, however, was emphatic in the interview on Tuesday, conducted in English in the presidential offices, that his government would find it impossible to take part in elections unless these changes took place. He said holding elections under the current conditions would be "obscene."

Bosnian government officials said that free and fair elections would be impossible as long as Karadzic and Mladic remained in power, even behind the scenes.

The government also worries that under somewhat ambiguous election rules, the Serbs might use large concentrations of Serbian refugees to win political control of local governments in traditionally Muslim towns that the Serbs won by force. The rules allow people to register to vote in their former homes, or in places in which they now live. Thus Serbs who have moved into Muslims' homes in towns like Srebrenica, where Muslims were driven out and many were massacred, have a right to vote in these areas. In most cases the Serbs now outnumber the Muslims, making a Muslim return to power in these places impossible, even if absentee voters cast their ballots.

"Today Srebrenica is packed with Serbs from the Sarajevo suburbs and the Muslims are gone," said Ganic. "If the Serbs are allowed to vote in Srebrenica they will elect a Serb mayor and a Serb city council. This will give the official stamp of approval to ethnic cleansing.

"The Serbs in places like Srebrenica should go and vote in the places they used to live, not in the villages and towns they took from Muslims and now occupy. Let them go back to the Sarajevo suburbs and elect a Serb mayor."

But while officials of the Organization of Security and Co-Operation in Europe said they recognized the "contradiction" implicit in the voting procedures they also said that the Muslim-led government had agreed to the rules, and that change at this stage was impossible.

"There was a long struggle over this issue," said Peter Burkhard, a Swiss official involved in the elections. He said the Bosnian government had argued strongly in favor of requiring people to vote in the places they lived before the war broke out, but that the Serbs had argued for allowing people to choose, instead, to vote in places in which they were newly settled. But both parties agreed in April to the current procedures, he said.

By all accounts, many of the conditions set out by the Dayton agreement for free elections have not been met. They include freedom of movement for all people in Bosnia, free access by the opposition to news organizations, the establishment of independent news media, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and a return by refugees and the displaced to their prewar homes.

The Dayton agreement, while prohibiting Karadzic from running for office, does not stop him from being in power while elections take place. Officials of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe said it was conceivable that they would certify that conditions for elections were acceptable, although Karadzic remained in power.

The protest by the Bosnian government comes on the heels of the failure by the international community, led by Carl Bildt, who is overseeing the carrying out of the peace plan, to push Karadzic out of office. Bildt and Western officials have asked the Serbian president, Slobodan Milosovic, to exert pressure on Karadzic to step down. And Western officials have threatened to withhold economic aid if Milosovic does not push the Bosnian Serb leader from power.

But so far Milosovic appears to have little interest in directly challenging Karadzic. Western diplomats said it seems he sees the September elections as the vehicle for sidelining Karadzic.

Karadzic, in a consolidation of his hold on power, recently removed more moderate leaders, who had worked with the international community, and replaced them with hard-line followers. He has also proposed holding a referendum, before the elections, to show the rest of the world that most of the Serbs support him. While such a referendum would not be recognized as valid by the international community, it might give Karadzic the ammunition he needs to sabotage the elections.