Envoy in Charge of Fall Voting is
Apprehensive Yet Confident
(PRAGUE, March 21—Reuters) An envoy in charge of setting up elections in Bosnia said on Thursday that voting rights and access to the media were key obstacles to conducting fair polls this year as mandated under the Dayton peace deal. Swiss Foreign Minister Flavio Cotti, current chairman of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), told a meeting of diplomats in Prague he had both confidence and apprehension about meeting the Dayton mandates.Cotti said the proportional system for electing a parliament, which an OSCE commission set up along with representives of the seperate factions in Bosnia, as well as absentee voting allowing refugees who fled the war to vote, was essential. But he said "It remains open to question whether the rules can actually be applied in practice, whether the large number of signatures required for candidacy and whether the balloting in seperate electoral districts will not put the representatives of minorities at a disadvantage."
The U.S.-brokered Dayton peace accord signed by presidents of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia late last year calls for free elections, run by the OSCE, by September. Elections are one of the key elements envisioned in the agreement to return the war-ravaged republic to stability but, with a lack of independent media or human rights guarantees, Western officials say the date may have to be postponed.
Cotti, who visited Sarajevo in January, told the ambassadors to the trans-Atlantic 53-member OSCE that its mission to Bosnia had set up operations in record time to prepare for rapid elections. He said the OSCE backed a plan for only one single round of elections but giving the vote to Bosnian refugees wherever they might be at the time of the poll would be "a very difficult task." Cotti stressed that access to free media for all parties and candidates was "indispensable, not only for the elections, but also for the development of democracy thereafter."
To that end, Cotti said, he supported the mission's plan to set up a Bosnia-wide television network to which all parties in the election would have access. He said the "absolute condition" for successful elections was protection of fundamental and human rights, but he cautioned against expecting too much from the elections. "I would like to state clearly: no on will be able to give himself over to an exaggerated perfectionism," he said. "Bosnia and Herzegovina will not be able to organize elections as do states which have been nurturing democracy for decades or centuries."
Ground Rules Set for Bosnia's September Elections
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