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The refugees from Bosnia have made a huge detour of the polling stations open by the OEBS throughout Yugoslavia in order to offer them a possibility to vote in absence during the first post-war elections in Bosnia. They had a few reasons for such an attitude, and the most significant is called the form P2.

Out of almost a half a million refugees from BIH in SRY, 220,000 registered for elections in Bosnia. They could choose the polling station: their previous residence, their current residence or their future residence. God only knows this was by itself, a huge political choice in post-Dayton circumstances. Even those politically illiterate and with no hostility (if there are such left) are well aware that the choice of a voting station indirectly means voicing out on the subject of the war dispute. The Serbian party went to war aiming at restricting territories and separating itself from the neighbors. The Moslem party defended itself pointing as its goal to unite the territories and enable life of its people within the same state boundaries. The war ended with no distinct winner and with many defeated, and the two parties continued fighting for the old goals but with new weapons. Under the pre-electoral conditions, that means it is convenient for the authorities in Sarajevo that all of the former inhabitants of Bosnia vote where they lived in 1991, hoping that one day the results of ethnic extermination will be deleted and the refugees will return home. On the contrary, the authorities from Pale find it convenient the voters vote anyplace, only not where they lived before the war - of course, if they fled from the territories that is currently belonging to the Bosnian-Croat federation. It should be said that there’s no difference in the standpoint on the polling station between the opposition and the leading parties. The opposition in Sarajevo is equally vehement as the party in power for reintegration of Bosnia and voting in the places where they lived before the war. In the last issue of the review "Svijet" in Sarajevo, Nijaz Skenderagic, the member of the presidency of the opposition party SDP BIH (renamed former communists), criticized one of the OEBS’s reports by saying: "To enlist 300,000 people to vote where they previously lived, means preventing at least 600,000 people to return to their homes... OEBS massively enlists into the voting lists those who inhabited somebody else’s houses, somebody else’s property and who expelled former owners."

The opposition in Republika Srpska, however, is not much behind SDS in stirring the Serbian voter not to return where they lived before, i.e., in rejecting the rights of the refugees of different confessions to return to Republika Srpska, even if only for voting. During voter registration, the refugees had to choose between two forms: form P1 for those who intend to vote in the place where they lived before, and P2 for those who intend to vote in the current or future place of inhabitancy. Virtually nobody, except the liberal Western press, was not taken by surprise when the majority of refugees in FRY chose the second alternative, conditionally called "the Serbian". One hundred and five thousand voters chose form P2, compared to 75,000 of those who chose form P1. (This second number is not that big if the assertion of the Committee for Refugees of Serbian that in FRY there is 100,000 non-Serb refugees is true. On the other hand, it is not that small if the assertions of the international community and the Helsinki Watch in Belgrade that the refugees are prevented from registering for voting in FRY are true.)

The president of the Helsinki Watch board for Serbia Sonja Biserko says for Vreme that the very process of voting was concrete and abided by the rules, and that the manipulations were possible when matching voting forms with the lists of registered voters. She warns that many voters in FRY complained that they had not received the ballots by mail and this brings to the attention of OEBS the possible manipulations with the ballots that were not received by the refugees.

And what is going to happen with the votes of 135,000 refugees who decided to travel to Bosnia on September 14th? Regulations dictate that in previous residence, one could vote in absence, which means from abroad, and that in the intended or the new residence, one may vote personally, on the spot. For example, thirty five thousand of the Bosnian Serbs in FRY have decided to vote in Brcko. Last week, the international community decided to postpone the local elections in Bosnia, explaining that during the registration of voters in FRY (and to the lesser extent in Croatia), the electoral engineering happened, wishing to confirm and legalize the effects of ethnic extermination. As examples of such engineering, i.e., abuse of the form P2, were quoted the results of registering the voters in Srebrenica and Brcko. The international community has the impression that such a great number of voters in FRY that act according to the will of SDS (and register for voting in the places where Republika Srpska desperately needs an ethnic majority) can not be the result of their free political conviction, but only the pre-electoral fraud, that is, the abuse of registering the voters.

For the time being it is not known whether there will be another registration of voters for the needs of local elections and if there will be reconsideration of the form P2. Chances are it will not. Explaining the decision on postponing local elections for the press in Washington, State Secretary Aid John Cornblum admitted last week that an unexpectedly large number of P2 forms does not represent that much a breakage of the text but of the spirit of Dayton, and that the people, according to the Dayton Agreement, have the right to vote where they wish. Not even the most naive person, however, would not believe that 35 thousand of Bosnian refugees in Serbia, out of which some maybe never saw Brcko, is really ready to inhabit it after the elections, so neither Frovik nor Cornblum believed it. The question is who is going to take all those people to Brcko to vote on September 14th.

Joining the Fear

The veterans of the Bosnian experiment on the battlefield from November 1990 are tormented by a nightmare: that all this is just a replay of ‘90's "first free and multi-party elections" when falsely united national parties gained power. Political life today follows the same principle of fear from the opposite nationalistic camp as then ("I would not vote for Karadic, but I fear my Moslem neighbor will vote for Izetbegovic"). The parties in power spread fear of "wasting" the national votes. The organ of SDA "Ljiljan" threats the Bosnians that if their votes disperse among various candidates for the BIH presidency member, Momcio Krajisnik will become the first president of Bosnia-Herzegovina (which is possible in theory because the first candidate for three-member BIH presidency will be the one that gains the greatest number of votes. It should be said that three members will switch presiding place every six months). However, in all likelihood, it is not only about the fear of Momcilo Krajisnik as it is the fear of Izetbegovic’s opponent Haris Silajdzic. The same method is used by the state media in Republika Srpska: they make efforts to discipline citizens to vote for Biljana Plavsic by spreading fear about Abid Djozic being elected for the president of RS who is the candidate of SDA. The Bosnians and the Serbs must be united, trumpeted the state presidencies. This method was successful in 1990, and on September 14th it could be even more triumphant. The citizens have been in the last four months convinced their fears are not "irrational", but entirely reasonable and justified.