June 25, 1996
Bosnia's Muslim Refugees Find Election a Dilemma
By ALAN COWELL
OETTINGEN, Germany -- As a former salesman in what was once Yugoslavia, Ramiz Mehinovic knows the flavor of a bad deal. And, he says, he is coming to taste it again in the preparations for elections in his native Bosnia.
The Clinton administration is promoting the elections vigorously, but Mehinovic, a Muslim who was forced to trade his livelihood and his home for the life of a refugee in Germany, suspects the vote will yield no more than a mocking benediction on the spoils of war and ethnic cleansing for the Bosnian Serbs.
American and other Western officials say that national elections in Bosnia, creating a legislature and shared presidency, will help begin stitching the fractured country back together. But many refugees in Germany, far from seeing the elections as something that will make it more attractive to return home, fear just the opposite.
The reason for the doubts that afflict Mehinovic and hundreds of thousands of other Bosnian refugees, who form a huge and potentially decisive part of Bosnia's voters, lies in the rules for registration and voting. Those rules, in turn, reflect the bitter divisions of the war and the contradictory impulses toward ethnic division and national unity put forth at the Bosnian peace accord negotiated last year in Dayton, Ohio.
Under those rules, which have been spelled out by an international commission following principles laid down in the Dayton accord, Bosnians may vote by absentee ballot or in person, either in the place where they resided in 1991, before the war erupted, or a new location where they plan to live in the future, provided they show up there in person.
For many Bosnian refugees who feel they cannot return to their original homes despite provisions for freedom of movement in the peace accord, this presents a wrenching choice.
In 1991, for instance, Mehinovic lived in Doboj, which is now under Bosnian Serb control, with few, if any, Muslims remaining. Sending his absentee ballot there would mean sanctioning the almost certain election of a Serb representative to the new legislature. This, he says, would mean legitimizing the same people who hounded him and 60,000 other Muslims from the town.
Yet by registering to vote someplace else, he says, he would similarly be confirming Bosnia's effective partition.
"Bill Clinton wants these elections for his own election campaign," Mehinovic said in a recent conversation at a meeting place for refugees in this central German city. "Every child knows that. But as long as there's no freedom of movement, as long as war criminals are in power, there can be no democracy."
Jasna Causevic, a translator from Sarajevo, added: "Nobody wants to register in another place. If they did, they would become refugees in their own country. Nobody wants even to vote in the village next door to their own."
The refugees' anxieties represent a new twist in the already fraught debate over how elections can be held in Bosnia by Sept. 14, the deadline specified in the Dayton accord. Before then, the international group charged with organizing the elections, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, must determine that conditions exist for fair elections and overcome the logistical challenge of carrying them out.
The refugees' concerns are compounded by the nature of Bosnia's division, which many Muslims believe has left hardline nationalists -- whether Serb, Croat, and Muslim -- dominating the electoral process.
"The people who are in power are the greedy ones, greedy for money and power," said Sedika Saleh, from the town of Odzak, now under joint Bosnian Croat-Muslim control. "And there will be a lot of pressure. People won't be allowed to vote against them."
Not only that, accused war criminals, including the Bosnian Serb political leader, Radovan Karadzic, and the military commander, Ratko Mladic, are still in power in the Serbian region and have influence on the voting.
According to the latest figures issued by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, there are almost 700,000 Bosnian refugees, mostly Muslims, living outside the former Yugoslavia. Almost half of them are in Germany, which is unwilling to formally extend any guarantee of refuge beyond Oct. 1.
Additionally, some 660,000 Bosnian refugees, including 450,000 Bosnian Serbs, are scattered around the former Yugoslavia, but mostly in Serbia. Adding the number of displaced people in Bosnia itself, that means about half of Bosnia's eligible voters could cast absentee ballots, since few refugees have returned home.
The refugees have not yet been informed about how to register and vote. Judy Thompson, an official of the organization arranging the elections, said in an interview from Sarajevo that voters will choose a three-man presidency, a national legislature, separate parliaments for the Serbian and the Muslim-Croat entities, and municipal authorities.
Most political parties have placed themselves on electoral lists throughout Bosnia so that, technically, a Bosnian Muslim party will be able to field a candidate, for example, in Srebrenica, which is controlled by the Bosnian Serbs. In reality, there are more questions than answers.
Would a Muslim candidate be permitted to campaign in a Bosnian Serb area, and vice versa? If people like Mehinovic vote according to where they used to live, would they be permitted to travel there?
Amid the confusion of elections, the refugees must also ponder whether the current peace seems lasting enough to warrant moving back to Bosnia. Esef Alja, a former Yugoslav policeman from the once largely Muslim town of Bijeljina, which is now under Bosnian Serb control, is not convinced this is the case.
"I want to go home to vote, but who will guarantee my safety?" he said. "This is not the time for elections. First, everybody must be able to go home. The only reason the elections will take place is because the world wants them to take place."
