Bosnia Votes On Ethnic Sovereignty Nato Troops Watch Over Crucial Ballot

Under the watch of NATO peacekeeping troops, tens of thousands of Bosnians voted Saturday in municipal elections that could restore local political power to ethnic communities expelled from their homes during Bosnia’s 3-1/2-year war.

The $50 million, two-day vote is seen by U.S. and European officials as a crucial step in rebuilding the country and preventing renewed warfare. But the tension and political fighting leading up to and continuing through the first day of voting illustrated the depth of unhealed animosity.

An additional 3,000 troops of the NATO peacekeeping force were deployed in Bosnia on rural roads and in disputed cities. One explosion caused minor damage but no injuries at a political party office in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, and several incidents of verbal harassment of minority voters were reported.

Not surprising, most of the trouble Saturday occurred in areas where hard-line ruling nationalists face likely defeat at the hands of refugees registered to vote where they had lived before the war. Assuring that winners actually take office will be the next major challenge for international mediators.

Here in Srebrenica, the Bosnian Serb nationalists who seized the eastern town two years ago under the direction of their former president, Radovan Karadzic, now fear that they will be outvoted by the Muslims they expelled.

In a back room at Srebrenica’s Dom Kulture center, across the street from the ruins of a mosque, members of Karadzic’s dominant Serbian Democratic Party, or SDS, scoured voter-registration lists on Saturday for Muslim names, checking against a Red Cross book that contains the names of thousands of missing from the war. They contend that many of the names appear on both lists and that the missing, many of whom are presumed dead, were added to voter registration lists to inflate the Muslim voting strength.

They hope to make a case for ignoring the election results in Srebrenica, whose fall to the Bosnian Serb army precipitated one of Europe’s worst atrocities since World War II - the disappearance and suspected slayings of thousands of Muslim men and boys by Serbs - and earned Karadzic an indictment on genocide charges.

A few miles away, Muslims expelled from Srebrenica in the July 11, 1995, Serb takeover were bused to an isolated voting station near a village called Zutica - “Hepatitis” - to cast their ballots.

Elderly men, women in traditional Muslim baggy pants, and even a few former soldiers passed gingerly under the scrutiny of about two dozen Bosnian Serb police officers - and at least as many U.S. soldiers and international police monitors - to vote.

They had to walk across a 20-foot bridge of splintered wooden beams over the Jadar River to a white metal container sitting in a field alongside the jagged shells of bombed-out Muslim homes. That was their voting booth.

In a scenario similar to that in Srebrenica, Bosnian Croat nationalists stand to lose elections in six cities they seized during the war where Bosnian Serb populations, expelled and living as exiles, outnumber Croat settlers. The largest is Drvar, near Bosnia-Herzegovina’s border with Croatia, where Bosnian Croat poll workers on Saturday attempted to prevent bused-in Bosnian Serbs from voting by claiming that they couldn’t understand the Cyrillic letters on the Serbs’ identification cards.

“The Croats were processing about four Serbs an hour. It was ugly,” said Robert Gelbard, the U.S. special envoy for Bosnia, who helicoptered to Drvar to intervene.

More than 1,000 Serbs attempting to vote in Drvar were stranded on roads to the polling stations after nightfall, according to election organizers, who announced a five-hour extension of voting hours until midnight.