Bosnians vote in election seen as showdown with nationalists

Robert H. Reid

Saturday, Nov. 11, 2000 | 10:57 a.m.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Bosnians voted Saturday in nationwide elections to determine whether this war-ravaged country follows its Balkan neighbors and rejects ethnic parties that led them into war.

Preliminary, unofficial results were not expected before Sunday, and the final tally could take weeks. The results will show whether the ethnic hostility that fueled Bosnia's bloody, 3 1/2 -year conflict is finally starting to abate five years after the fighting ended.

The multiethnic Social Democratic Party was expected to run strong in Muslim areas of the country, displacing the Party of Democratic Action, led by former Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic, surveys showed.

However, the Serb Democratic Party, founded by indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic, and the hard-line Croatian Democratic Union, which is opposed to ethnic cooperation, seemed certain to remain entrenched in Serb and Croat parts of the country.

Under the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the Bosnian war, this country is divided into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb republic loosely tied together by a federal parliament, a three-member presidency and other federal institutions.

Voters in the two ministates chose members of the federal parliament Saturday. Additionally, those in the Muslim-Croat Federation selected officials of 10 regional cantons, while Bosnian Serbs also voted for a president and vice president of their half of Bosnia.

Western-backed Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik was trailing in the pre-vote polls behind Bosnian Serb Vice President Mirko Sarovic of the Serb Democratic Party in the race for the Bosnian Serb presidency.

The Croatian Democratic Union, known by the initials HDZ, organized a simultaneous, unauthorized referendum asking Croats if they support the party's campaign for an internationally recognized Croat ministate.

International officials who administer Bosnia-Herzegovina under the Dayton agreement ordered Bosnian media not to report on the referendum.

Those administrators hope voters will follow the lead of their neighbors in Yugoslavia and Croatia and elect reform-minded leaders.

Chief among them is Zlatko Lagumdzija, a 44-year-old Muslim management professor whose Social Democrats were the only major party fielding candidates in all three ethnic regions. Lagumdzija's party ran on a platform promising economic development, legal reform and ethnic tolerance.

"I hope that today the people of Bosnia are choosing the future and getting away from the past," Lagumdzija told reporters Saturday. "I'm sure that the Bosnian people will send a clear message to the nationalistic parties that were running this country for the past 10 years that they have to go to the past where they belong."

His message appeared to have resonance in Muslim areas.

"I'm here to vote for change, to stop the corruption, the lies and misery in which we find ourselves today," said Sandra Fazlic, a 20-year-old student in Tuzla. "But the Social Democrats should also know that if they cheat us, we won't wait another 10 years to come up with changes again."

Disenchantment with ethnically based, nationalist parties has increased throughout the country because they have failed to improve the lives of Bosnia's people since the end of the war.

Because those parties were more interested in defending their own power bases rather than promote national unity, this country of 4.3 million people has three legal codes, three telephone networks, three electric power systems and three educational systems.

Western economic experts say the country can never advance economically without the sort of integration which ethnic parties have resisted.

Nevertheless, all major Bosnian Serb parties pledged to resist any attempts to curb powers of the Serb ministate. The Croatian referendum was a clear sign the Croat leadership opposes Western-encouraged steps toward integration.

"I think this is the final moment for Croats themselves to declare what kind of Bosnia-Herzegovina they want to live in," Bosnian Croat President Ante Jelavic told reporters in Mostar.

Bosnian Croats received strong support from Croatia during the rule of the late strongman Franjo Tudjman, who died in December. However, his successor, Stipe Mesic, called Saturday's referendum a failure and urged Bosnian Croats to cooperate with their fellow Bosnians.

Bosnian Serb political leaders say it is too early to tell whether the fall last month of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic will encourage democratization here. Milosevic's successor, Vojislav Kostunica, has made contacts with Bosnian Serb leaders, including hard-liners.