June 30, 1996
Bosnian City's Election Only Widens Ethnic Gap
By CHRIS HEDGES
OSTAR, Bosnia -- When Josip Musa, a candidate for Mostar's city council, arrived at his office Friday morning he found himself locked out and the windows and walls covered with the red-and-white posters of west Mostar's governing party, the Croatian Democratic Union.
It was the last straw for Musa, an ethnic Croat who with Muslim supporters has run a quixotic campaign for municipal elections on Sunday, calling for a united city and the rebuilding of a multiethnic society.
After weeks of death threats, the iron refusal of local radio and television stations to give him air time, and intimidation so severe that his backers are afraid to put up campaign posters or hand out leaflets, he said he has had enough.
"This isn't an election," Musa said. "Anyone who is not an extremist is forced to campaign covertly. And those of us who call for a united Bosnia and a return to civilized society are not even given a voice, much less a chance to run."
The municipal elections in the divided city of Mostar were meant to be the crowning achievement of the European Community's costly effort to rebuild a Bosnian city where Serbs, Croats and Muslims could live as neighbors again.
Instead, the elections appear set to ratify ethnic partition and have left many questioning the wisdom of holding nationwide elections in Bosnia scheduled for September.
In Mostar, the international community was unable to open the political debate. Muslims on the east side of the city did not campaign in the Croatian-controlled west side, because of the threat of violence. Croats never set foot on the Muslim side. And anyone who proposed a society not built along ethnic lines was silenced.
"This is a glimpse of what to expect in September when the Bosnian elections take place," said a senior official in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, who did not want to be quoted by name.
"While we wanted this election in Mostar to be a step toward the reunification of the city and the institution of democratic rule it has turned out to be a farce, a game manipulated by nationalists to solidify their power and their privilege."
The campaign itself was stillborn. There were few rallies or campaign events and little public debate. Croatian nationalists, along with members of the Muslim-led Party of Democratic Action, broadcast sordid messages of hate and revenge.
Musa said that when his multiethnic group tried to hold small meetings, the Croatian Democratic Union "would bus in groups of widows and mothers who lost children, all dressed in black."
"They would scream for revenge and shout us down," he said. "It was impossible for us to continue. And the same tactic was used by the Muslims on the other side."
The election is being supported and paid for by Mostar's temporary European Union administration, which will run the city until the end of July. It is designed to create a single city council with the same number of seats for ethnic Muslims and Croats, who will then elect one mayor.
The council is then slated to be integrated into the U.S.-brokered federation, which has so far failed to take root, between Muslim-dominated Bosnia and Croat-dominated Herzegovina.
The proportional electoral law, the only one that was finally acceptable to Muslim and Croat leaders, means that voters, who are listed on the 1991 census, will cast their ballots for party or coalition lists, rather than for individual candidates.
The 48-seat city council will reserve 16 seats for Croats, 16 for Muslims and five for Serbs, with the rest to be handed to undetermined candidates. The results, critics point out, are predetermined, with each side guaranteed its quota, based on ethnic lines.
"The only way we could finally get this election to go ahead was to rig it in such a way that the Muslim and Croat nationalists were sure to win," said the official from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is overseeing the Bosnian elections and other civilian aspects of the Dayton accord.
"It is virtually certain now that the Croats will get three municipalities and the Muslims will get three municipalities. The separate rule of east and west Mostar will continue."
The ethnic Croats, who call for unification with Zagreb, made it plain Friday that the elections would not propel them into the federation with the Muslims, with whom they fought a bitter war in 1993 and 1994.
And senior Bosnian Croat leaders blithely dismissed the elections' stated goal -- to unite the two groups -- as irrelevant.
"The Bosnian Muslims have the cities of Sarajevo and Tuzla," said the mayor of west Mostar, Mijo Brajkovic.
"And the Bosnia Serbs have the city of Banja Luka. But what do the Bosnian Croats have? In what city in Bosnia can Croatian children go to Croatian schools, freely worship in Catholic churches and feel secure? The only place left to us is Mostar. It is here that we will safeguard our culture, our language and our community. We are not about to turn Mostar over to a Muslim state."
When Safet Orucevic, the mayor of Muslim east Mostar, was informed of his Croatian counterpart's latest statement, he sighed.
"Listen," he said. "If the Croats continue to obstruct and refuse to become part of the federation, then nothing will change here. At that point President Clinton can rip up the Washington agreement that formed the federation as well as the Dayton peace accord. The agreements, if the Croats are not made to cooperate, will become worthless documents."
But many European officials say they are faced now with a more immediate concern -- security.
Under the election rules, Croats, Muslims and Serbs are all permitted to return from other countries and towns to their original homes to vote. For many this will be the first visit since they were expelled, or fled, four or five years ago. About 60,000 of the 130,000 people who lived in Mostar before the war have left.
Some 2,500 heavily armed NATO-led peacekeeping troops, also known as IFOR for implementation force, have positioned themselves at most crossroads and in armored vehicles along the former confrontation line, much of it defined by the deep gorges that fall to the Neretva River, which slices through the center of the city.
The European Union will run shuttles of heavily guarded buses to the 77 polling places. And European officials in Mostar have advised those entering the city not to walk in neighborhoods controlled by other groups.
Busloads of Serbs, who once made up 18 percent of the city's prewar population, planned to arrive over the weekend from Serbia. Several thousand ethnic Croats, who made up 28 percent of Mostar's prewar population, are expected to come too, as are many Muslims, who used to form 34 percent of the city.
"We will have hundreds of IFOR troops and police out this weekend," said Dragan Gasic, the spokesman for the European Union mission in Mostar. "And we hope their presence will be enough to deter attacks. But in the end, we can't control everything."
