Ibrahim Spahic, who bears a startling resemblance to former New York Mayor Ed Koch, is a nice guy probably destined to finish last in Bosnia’s elections this September.
Spahic is head of the Civic Democratic Party, a multi-ethnic group of artists, intellectuals and writers that supports the battered notion that Muslims, Croats and Serbs can somehow live together in a unified Bosnia.
The party’s headquarters, in a cluttered office in Sarajevo, is crammed with campaign leaflets that will be seen by few outside the capital.
“The problem is we can’t reach the people. I can’t advertise on Serb TV. I can’t even go to the Republika Srpska to campaign (because) NATO can’t guarantee my safety,” he said.
For Spahic and other opposition candidates, the real issue in the Bosnian elections, now set for Sept. 14, is whether a little democracy is better than no democracy at all.
Virtually none of the pre-conditions set forth by the Dayton accords for “free and fair elections” has been achieved.
The presence of some 50,000 NATO troops has brought fighting to a halt, but few refugees have felt safe enough to return home.
Freedom of movement is sharply circumscribed, and opposition parties have had almost no access to the media.
Even more problematic, indicted war criminals Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader, and his military commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, still cling to power, although arrest warrants were issued Thursday by the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague charging them with genocide. They can be seized if they cross any international border.
But at the prodding of the Clinton administration, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the group charged with running the election, has decided to go ahead with the vote as planned.
Although some European allies complained that Washington was putting domestic political considerations ahead of the practicalities of building peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina, most now concede that delaying the election is not likely to improve matters.
“Beginning the process is critical,” said Ronald Dreyer, the OSCE representative in Serb-held western Bosnia.
“Of course, there is nothing like a democratic environment as we would like to see it. There has been a terrible war here for the last four years, and you can’t expect a perfect democracy after four months, but you have to show progress,” Dreyer said.
Going ahead with elections, however, will be a high-stakes gamble. If the vote merely ratifies the de facto partition of Bosnia into three hostile ethnic cantons, it could render the Dayton agreement meaningless and raise serious questions about the purpose of the NATO peacekeeping mission.
Opposition leaders across the ethnic spectrum generally agree it is a gamble worth taking, that postponing the elections will only strengthen the hand of the warlords who want a partitioned Bosnia.
“We know the situation here will be unstable after the elections, but it will be better than the stable totalitarianism we have now,” said Miodrag Zivanovic, a Serb academic who heads the opposition Social-Liberal Party in Banja Luka, the largest Serb-held city in Bosnia.
Most analysts expect that Muslim and Croat voters will strongly back their respective nationalist parties. Serbs, too, will vote along straight ethnic lines, but–surprisingly–many believe that Karadzic’s Serb Democratic Party (SDS) will not be the outright winner.
Robert Frowick, the American diplomat who heads OSCE mission in Bosnia, threatened this week to exclude the SDS from the election unless Karadzic steps aside as party leader–he has already stepped aside “temporarily” as president–but barring the SDS could backfire, according to Serb moderates.
Zivanovic, for one, predicts that a Karadzic-led SDS will fare poorly in the election, mainly as a result of the anger and disillusionment among the hundreds of thousands of Serbs living abroad who will be eligible to vote.
“These people are definitely not going to vote for Karadzic,” he said, adding that “Karadzic is politically dead only if he loses an election.”
Ljubomir Berberovic, another Serb intellectual who supports the idea of a multi-ethnic Bosnia, suggested a more compelling reason why SDS hard-liners might not dominate the Serb elections: Slobodan Milosevic.
“No election in which Milosevic has taken an active role has ever finished unsatisfactorily for him,” said Berberovic. “No SDS domination of Serb politics is possible if Milosevic is on the scene–and he is.”
Indeed, the Serbian president will be fielding and funding his own slate of candidates under the Socialist Party banner.
It was Milosevic’s crude nationalist rhetoric that propelled him to power and Yugoslavia to ruin in the 1980s. But following Dayton, he and his supporters have been forced to adopt a more pragmatic tone.
In a recent interview, Dragutin Ilic, the party’s vice president in Banja Luka, criticized the politics of ethnic fear that still paralyze so much of Bosnia’s population.
“The Serb leaders here threaten the people with Muslims and Croats. The Muslim and Croat leaders threaten their people with the Serbs. It’s so easy to get caught up in this manipulation,” Ilic said.
“What we must do is convince our people that it is in their interest to choose respectable leaders, not leaders who will push them back to war, but leaders who will end our isolation and create conditions for normal living,” he said.
Skeptics may doubt the sincerity of the Socialist Party’s conversion, but its opponents apparently are taking it seriously. Since April, a rash of bombings has disrupted Socialist Party rallies, and leaders, including Ilic, have been threatened and harassed by SDS thugs, according to OSCE election monitors.
