Migration of Votes

If all refugees return to their homes, Serbs will be a minority in their own republic. When the senior EU official in Sarajevo says that, he does not conceal this thought pleases him. And the best would come after the elections. If everyone votes in their ex-hometowns, Serbs will be left without power in their own republic. The spirit of Dayton will triumph and Bosnia-Herzegovina’s reintegration will have been achieved.

What is most important is that the latter can be achieved without the former. Moslem refugees do not have to return home to vote in the Bosnian Serb Republic, but the outcome of the elections can dramatically improve their chances of returning home after the elections. This is precisely what makes the Dayton elections the most complex ballot-casting in the history of democracy.

Freedom of choice can be defined in various ways. Never have the Bosnian citizens had the freedom to choose the residence where they will vote as they will on September 14, 1996; and they never will, most probably. If they want to vote in the place they lived in the spring of 1991, during the last census, they can do so, personally or in absence, be they in Malme, Sweden, or Belgrade, Yugoslavia, or, in any other Bosnian town. If they want to vote in the place they have moved to in the meantime, either since the spring of 1991 or after the Bosnian war broke out in April 1992, they can. If they want neither, if they want to vote in the place to which they intend to move one day, i.e. neither in the place they lived in in 1991 nor now, but in a third, desired and planned one, they can. In that case, they have to appear in that place and vote, even if they still have not moved there.

Under this criterion, therefore, these elections will be the most free in history. Besides parties and leaders, Bosnian citizens will also choose their voting sites. They would probably be glad to exchange this freedom for some more elementary and relevant freedoms and goods. They can thank their leaders and their international sponsors, and the haggling that had gone on among them, for this chance of being the guinea pigs of the first elections of the kind.

In keeping with the principle that refugees and displaced people have the right to return to their homes, it was first said in Dayton that "it is expected" that all Bosnian citizens vote in their pre-war hometowns, personally or in absence. This was simultaneously a concession to the Moslem side. The Moslems, partly because they make up the majority of the Bosnian population, are interested in achieving the pre-war Bosnian population.

Subsequently, through talks and concessions, haggling and pouting, the Serb side cajoled the Frowick Committee and OSCE into adding to the election rules the exception that those who do not want to vote in their pre-war hometowns, will be able to cast ballots in the places in which they have settled in the meantime. Bosnian Serbs are not vociferously demanding to go back to their homes (except maybe back to Drvar and Grahovo) and the option of everyone voting in his current place of residence probably suits their leaders the most. The Serb third of the ex-Bosnian population has settled in half of the ex-Bosnia, holding a convincing majority there after the ethnic cleansing. It is highly probable that the Bosnian Serbs will turn the exception into a rule and vote in the Bosnian Serb Republic as a rule. The problem Bosnian Serbs have, however, is that there are not as many of them and that the refugee Bosniaks can frustrate their designs, if they decide to merely vote in absence in the places where they had made up the ethnic majority before the ethnic cleansing. As in Srebrenica, for example.

An average citizen of Bosnia-Herzegovina, displaced, unhappy, miserable, is probably left indifferent by such a variety of choices, but the political parties, particularly those in power, have inconceivable opportunities to maneuver the votes. The crucial influence on the outcome of the elections, particularly the local ones, will be achieved already during the voters’ registration. In Tuzla, for example, the chances of the ex-Reformists (now the Union of Bosnia-Herzegovina Social Democrats, UBSD) will depend on whether refugees from Srebrenica and other ethnically-cleansed areas will vote there or whether the Tuzla authorities will be elected mostly by the town’s pre-war population. Brcko could be an even better example.

Elaine Konkievich, OSCE human rights official in Srebrenik, told VREME that 300,000 people may tomorrow "freely choose" to vote in Brcko, expressing in this way their alleged intention to move there in the future. The importance of the corridor and upcoming arbitration in Brcko makes it feasible that both the Serb and Bosniak authorities apply the same political tactic: to try and prejudice the arbitration decision on this town by winning the elections there. The Serbs’ "advantage" is that they can prevent by force the voting of Bosniaks, who had not lived in Brcko before the war by force and of those who might wish to move there and who would in that case have to appear in Brcko to cast the ballot. Bosniaks had been the majority in Brcko and they don’t have to resort to tricks; all they have to do is register for the elections as ex-Brcko citizens and vote in absence. The Serbs’ disadvantage is that they have no votes to spare. If 300,000 people, directly or in absence, take part in the elections in a town in which some 40,000 people lived before the war, what will the OSCE do? Will it annul the elections in Bosnia? Or just in Brcko? Or will it accept the consequences of the haggling between the stronger and weaker powers in Bosnia and over Bosnia? Will such elections be "free and fair"? On the other hand, even if this immense surplus of voters does not appear in Brcko, some kind of "surplus" will definitely turn up. All voters among the 35,000 Serbs currently living in Brcko can be expected to vote in Brcko. If the current Bosnian government persists in its declared commitment that all Bosniaks vote in the places they had been expelled from, then all those eligible to vote among the 30,000 Moslems and Croats expelled from Brcko will also vote in Brcko. And, if Brcko has twice as many voters as its population at the elections, a "shortage" will definitely appear somewhere else.

The issue, however, arises whether the current Bosnian government will persist in its principled commitments despite all the temptations set before it by the election rules and international community regulations. Konkievich said that the Srebrenica refugees did not want to say where they would vote until their Mayor Ibran Mustafic was released from a Serb jail to tell them what to do. Mustafic was exchanged for Col. Krsmanovic, but he still does not know what to tell them. He’s probably waiting for someone in Sarajevo to decide and tell him.

The Sarajevo independent press and opposition are already droning about the SDA election plots. They are accusing the authorities of slowly and secretly settling refugees from Doboj and Srebrenica in the suburbs evacuated by the Sarajevo Serbs earlier this year. This is assessed as not only accomodating refugees, but also as "accomodating" refugee votes, which the ruling SDA can count on more than the opposition parties. The Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje claims that the recent settlement in Sarajevo of eight thousand Bosniaks expelled from Doboj had been previously arranged at a secret meeting in the Sarajevo Refugee Ministry and says it is "a quiet ethnic demarkation to the benefit of forces whose aim is Bosnia’s clear-cut division". It says a "major political game" is in question and that the votes of the ex-citizens of Doboj and new citizens of Sarajevo will mean a lot to the ruling party in Sarajevo. The Sarajevo authorities’ principled stands when the refugees and their votes are in question will most probably depend on how threatened the SDA feels at the upcoming elections. SDA’s choice, therefore, will boil down to the choice between power and principle, between power and reintegration, or rather, between SDA in power and a unified Bosnia, whatever the latter may imply.

The Sarajevo authorities must also deliberate whether the international community will really enable voting in abstentia, as the Dayton accord guarantees. The peace agreement also says that voting will simultaneously imply the refugees’ intention of going back to Bosnia. The question arises whether Moslem refugees wish to endanger their chance of remaining in the West in exchange for the right to vote.

Representatives of the so-called international community in the field watch with consternation the monster which they had helped create. German diplomat Michael Steiner, Carl Bildt’s deputy, does not hide that, as far as he is concerned the elections need not take place at all if they are merely to legitimize the status quo in Bosnia. Steiner openly and gladly uses the term "desired outcome of the elections": he is not interested in the popular will per se, but in a popular will that will bring to power "people willing to cooperate within joint Bosnian institutions". He is disgusted at the authorities’ maneuvers to bring people who will vote as they wish to the new election areas, qualifying them as "new ethnic engineering". His data show that since Dayton, around 100,000 people returned to their homes, while another 90,000 have meanwhile left them.

Steiner shows his exasperation to every journalist who enters his office, assuring him that there are no conditions for free and fair elections in Bosnia until the refugees return to their homes. An anonymous 19-year-old Bosnian Serb soldier, who the reporter approached on the Pale-Zvornik road and asked whom he would vote for, replied: "I don’t know what parties exist. But I understood that all refugees will return home if the Socialists win. In that case, all our casualties will have been in vain".