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Bosnia's Upcoming Elections Threatened by Resignation of Top American Official
By John Pomfret
SARAJEVO, May 16, (Washington Post Foreign Service) — The sudden resignation of a top American official has disrupted planning for next September's Bosnian elections, a key element of the Dayton peace process, Western diplomats and Bosnian officials say. The departure announcement by William Steubner, chief of staff of the mission of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), underscored troubles and controversy faced by the Vienna-based organization assigned to carry out Bosnia's first nationwide vote since 1991, before the war.
Steubner's exit followed an attempt to resign by a colleague, Judy Thompson, a Canadian who heads the OSCE's task force on elections in Bosnia. Earlier this month, she tendered her resignation but was persuaded to return to the mission, officials said. An OSCE spokeswoman said both gave personal reasons for their actions. But the real explanation, officials say, involves a disagreement over whether Bosnia will be ready for an election by September.
According to colleagues, Steubner argued that Bosnia will not meet any of the conditions the OSCE has set out for it to hold an election, such as relatively free media, the right of people to return to their homes and vote and, most important, exclusion from the electoral process of indicted war criminals, such as Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
Steubner is a former U.S. Army major who has worked in Bosnia throughout the war. Some Clinton administration officials have said that as a supporter of the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, Senate Majority Leader Robert J. Dole, Steubner has used his position to derail the Bosnian elections, hurting implementation of the Dayton accord and thus President Clinton's reelection campaign. This charge is vehemently denied by Steubner and several of this colleagues.
The stakes in the disagreement are high, both for Bosnia and for the U.S. part of the operation. They help explain the acrimonious backbiting that has characterized this incident and appears to infect the OSCE's operation.
Steubner's supporters worry that if the elections go ahead, they will tend to legitimize the forced population transfers, called "ethnic cleansing," that were carried out mainly by the Serbs during Bosnia's 3 1/2-year war, and thus bring Bosnia another step toward ethnic partition. Western diplomats generally agree that ethnic partition in Bosnia is a recipe for more war.
Under the Dayton peace deal, nationwide elections are supposed to be held in Bosnia between "six and nine months" from the start of the NATO-led peacekeeping deployment last December. U.S. and other Western officials look to the elections to trigger a withdrawal of some of the forces and the first signal that an end is near for the operation, the most significant U.S. engagement in European security affairs since the end of the Cold War. The United States has contributed 20,000 troops, hundreds of millions of dollars and diplomatic leadership to the mission.
When U.S. troops began moving into Bosnia, Clinton promised that the soldiers would be home within a year of their deployment—Dec. 20. The Pentagon has since modified that stance, saying U.S. troops will begin withdrawing from Bosnia on or around that date. Any delay of the election would probably postpone the pullout further, creating political problems for Washington. Thus, pressure has been intense on Robert Frowick, a career U.S. diplomat who heads the OSCE mission to Bosnia, to certify by next month that the elections will be held in September. In an interview, Frowick acknowledged that pressure and argued that the dangers of postponing the vote were greater than those associated with holding it in September.
"We want to make this vote as democratic as we can, but people have got to understand that we're not talking about an ordinary situation here at all," he said.
Frowick contended that Bosnia's elections are perhaps the most complicated in modern history. The vote for the leaders of one country, supposedly reunited under the Dayton plan, will take place in three mini-states—one Serb, one Croat and one Muslim. More than 1,200 foreign supervisors will be monitoring the voting. But much of the balloting will take place outside of Bosnia, by the hundreds of thousands of refugees who await true peace so they can return to their homes. And inside Bosnia, many of those voting will be doing so outside their villages—either by choice or because they were kicked out of their homes.
Bosnia's nationwide election will have a trial run at the end of the month in the once divided city of Mostar, and already there are troubles there. Muslim and Serb leaders are threatening to boycott the vote because of a Croat demand that no absentee ballots be accepted. Earlier the Muslims had agreed to the Croat demand but later changed their minds.
Officials divide the OSCE's problems into two categories—logistical and political.
The election program marks the first time the Vienna-based organization has taken on such a massive endeavor, and officials acknowledge that it has undergone growing pains. "We were never equipped to handle something like this before," said an American official. "We are in way over our head."
So far, OSCE officials say, the agency has still not opened all its planned 22 field offices, and several of the functioning offices lack staff. Money has also been a problem. The OSCE has said it needs $37 million to implement elections and has yet to receive it from foreign donors.
An internal report said that given these logistical challenges, the organization could not expect to schedule the vote until Nov. 1, four days before the U.S. elections. That report, according to Joanna van Vliet, a spokeswoman for the mission, prompted a shake-up. "There have been problems," she said, "but we are adjusting to that and finding solutions." But another source of trouble faces the mission: Bosnia's tattered political spectrum.
Under the Dayton deal, agreed to in November, indicted war criminals such as Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander, are not supposed to be holding leadership positions. That hasn't happened. Karadzic recently announced that he plans to run for another term as president of the Serb area of Bosnia.
Another condition set by the OSCE for a free and fair election in Bosnia is the development of independent media. So far that is not happening, either. Frowick last week met Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and requested that they advocate freer media in the sectors they influence in Bosnia.
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