The Bosnian Serbs were the principal aggressors during the war and, predictably, they have committed the most egregious violations. Vote rigging was so blatant that the elections team this month canceled the munic- ipal component of the elections–even though its instructions from Washington and the European Community clear- ly have been to see that the polling takes place no matter what. Officials express dismay at this outcome, but that can’t be taken at face value; their anti-fraud measures were weak and inconsistent. And nation- al elections, where the voting will be just as flawed, are to go on as scheduled. Ready or not, here they come.
In fact, the conditions for a free election, let alone for a democratic government, exist nowhere in Bosnia. The profiteers and the hard men are in control now, and they have subverted the process. The government in Sarajevo no longer is the coalition of Muslim nationalist and democratic forces that fought to protect ethnic pluralism. The Muslim nationalist government of President Alija Izetbegovic has tried to muzzle the press and silence its opponents. Opposition candidate Haris Silajdzic has been physically attacked and his campaign workers intimidated. The Izetbegovic slate will win in a landslide. But at least there is an ideological choice. In Croat areas, the nationalist consensus is all but absolute. The political leadership is the same one that destroyed the city of Mostar in 1993–and that recently refused to accept the result of municipal elections there, supposedly a dry run for the national vote. The nationalists in Sarajevo, the genocidal Serb leadership in Pale and the Croat mafiosi of Herzegovina have won, as anyone who actually spends time in Bosnia knows perfectly well. It is quite cynical to pretend otherwise.
Far from heralding a new era of peace, the elections actually increase the chances of renewed war in Bosnia next spring. If the Croats in western Herzegovina declare independence or demand union with Croatia, it is virtually certain that the Bosnian government forces will attack. And Radovan Karadzic still dominates political life on the Serb side, guaranteeing that the party of war and ethnic cleansing will continue to set the agenda on that side of the IFOR separation zone. The people who will win these supposedly free elections have not changed. And in the ruin that Bosnia has become, people are more vulnerable than ever to appeals based on lowest-common-denominator politics: the politics of hatred and revenge.
But the international community in general, and the Clinton administration in particular, is adamant that the elections take place. It is important that everyone outside Bosnia understand what people on the ground there have known for a long time–that this rush to the polls has little to do with concern for the future of Bosnia. Were that the motivation, the elections would have been canceled long ago. Even Robert Frowick, charged with overseeing the process as the representative of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, concedes as much. The international community, he said recently, “has been trying to do too much in too short a time.”
From the White House perspective, the cost of delay in terms of domestic American politics is just too high. A bitter joke making the rounds in Sarajevo sums up many residents’ feelings of helplessness and dread for the future. The Bosnian elections will be postponed only if the American elections are, they say. If the Bosnian elections were canceled, President Clinton couldn’t start withdrawing American GIs before Nov. 5. And whatever the effects on Bosnia of such a pullout and of this unseemly push toward formal democracy in a place where real democracy has been shattered, that is too great a risk for the administration to contemplate. The real goal is not helping Bosnia, but doing nothing to hurt the president’s re-election chances.
To say that this is a shortsighted policy is to state the obvious. It may well be a wicked one. But if war breaks out again in the Balkans next spring, the U.S. elections will be over, and most American troops will be gone. The international community will have declared victory for democracy and gone home. The aid workers and those of us who covered the war will be back. Others will conclude that the world did what it could for Bosnia and wash their hands of the place, saying that those savage Balkan people were beyond help. That, however, will be a lie. The truth is, elections or no elections, we never really tried.
