Fri, 10 Nov 2000

Bosnians urged to reject nationalism in weekend poll

By Philippa Fletcher

SARAJEVO (Reuters): Across former Yugoslavia, voters have used elections this year to turn their backs on the parties that led them into war.

Bosnia, which suffered most in the bloodshed that stained Europe at the turn of the millennium, gets its chance to choose on Saturday.

But while there are signs of weariness with politics based on national identity, it is by no means certain that all of Bosnia's three main groups will choose moderates as their neighbors in Croatia, Yugoslavia and Kosovo have done.

The West, which struggled with the war and is still struggling with the peace, has made loud calls for change, using posters, video clips and an election song to send its message.

"Why are you always playing the same song when you can choose?" sing three young girls, a Muslim, Serb and Croat who, with a little help from their Western sponsors, even made it on to the satellite music television channel MTV.

In another Western-funded video clip, cartoon characters complain about their daily lives and then cower as a voice from a thunder cloud tells them there are more important goals -- a reference to nationalists' calls to defend the three groups.

Those calls have been loudest in Croat areas, where the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) warns that "extermination" looms if voters abandon it in favor of more moderate parties which it says are being unfairly favored by the West.

The Muslim Party of Democratic Action (SDA), campaigning on its wartime record of defending Bosnia's largest group against efforts by Serbs and Croats to split the former Yugoslav republic between them, has also cried foul.

The Serb Democratic Party (SDS), however, has kept its anti- Western rhetoric to a minimum, mildly dismissing charges by U.S. ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke that it is "criminal" and denying links to suspected war criminals like its founder, the wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

Unlike the other two nationalist parties, seen losing ground to moderates in the elections, opinion polls show strong public support for the SDS allegation that it is the Western-backed premier of the Serb entity, Milorad Dodik, who is corrupt.

This has given the West's attempt to persuade voters to "vote out corruption" a double-edged effect in the Serb republic, one of two entities in post-war Bosnia, and increased SDS confidence that it can sweep to victory there.

The anti-corruption message is key to the international community, which believes that while war is no longer imminent, it could break out again unless economic improvements replace national grievances in the minds of people on all three sides.

The West has poured billions of dollars into Bosnia since Holbrooke brokered a peace deal at a U.S. military air base in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995 but recovery has been painfully slow, some of the funds have simply vanished and patience is running out.

A year after its conflict, Kosovo is already being called a future Taiwan of the Balkans -- economically successful despite its disputed status -- Croatia is moving towards European integration and even Yugoslavia has started on its way.

One of the Western economists trying to end Bosnia's reliance on international aid said she was stunned that politicians in Belgrade were already discussing reforms just a month after authoritarian leader Slobodan Milosevic was ousted.

"There's no one doing that here," she said.

Instead, huge swathes of countryside remain dotted with abandoned, half-destroyed houses as local politicians in the Serb republic and Muslim-Croat federation block refugee returns to entrench the ethnic separation brought by the conflict.

And both Croat and Serb nationalists have warned they might move to boycott the joint institutions Western officials are trying to build up to prevent Bosnia sliding back to war when some 20,000 NATO-led peacekeepers eventually pull out.

Western officials say this is just pre-election rhetoric and attributed the complaints of Muslim and Croat nationalists to panic that they will lose Saturday's elections for regional and central parliaments.

They concede that in Serb-controlled areas, where there will be a presidential election alongside the parliamentary poll, nationalism has a firm grip, but hope that overall, Bosnians will make a break with the past.

"I don't for a moment believe the majority of Bosnian citizens want to remain prisoners of nationalist leaders who would block their entry into Europe," Wolfgang Petritsch, the West's top envoy, told intellectuals in Sarajevo last week.