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Postpone Bosnia's Elections, Says Helsinki Rights Group
The International Helsinki Federation
VIENNA, Austria, May 23 (AP) — Conditions to hold free and fair elections across Bosnia by fall do not exist and the vote should be postponed, a leading human rights group said Thursday. Holding a nationwide vote by mid-September, as foreseen in the Dayton peace accord, would only cement the dominance of hard-liners who caused the war and seal Bosnia’s division into ethnically based statelets, the International Helsinki Federation said.
The human rights group made its comments the same day that Bosnian Croat and Muslim partners agreed to postpone local elections in the bitterly divided town of Mostar. Colum Murphy, a spokesman for Carl Bildt, the representative overseeing civilian aspects of the peace agreement, said the Mostar voting now would take place sometime in June instead of May 31.
The Mostar announcement marked the first slippage in election timetables mandated by international accords, casting further questions over whether the Bosnia-wide elections can go ahead. The Helsinki group appealed to international mediators “to show some integrity” and admit that conditions for anything resembling a democratic vote do not exist.
“It is seriously to be feared that one will see cemented the practices of ethnic separation and that the people who led the war will continue to decide the fate of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” said Dardan Gashi, a consultant for the group that recently toured Bosnia.
Meetings on that tour included opposition politicans, journalists and international and national human rights monitors, Gashi said. In addition, the IHF — which is affiliated with Helsinki Watch in the United States — maintains a Sarajevo office and contact with monitors across Bosnia, he said. It also had access to reports by human rights monitors for the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, the organization that will decide whether elections should go ahead as scheduled.
“We didn’t hear anything positive from any of these people” and the OSCE’s own reports make clear that there is no freedom of movement or association, and no freedom for media — all essential for free elections, Gashi said.
Both Gashi and Therese Nelson, a lawyer who accompanied him to Sarajevo and Mostar, were critical of the NATO-led peace force, the U.N. police force and the OSCE for failing to guarantee free movement or do more to improve the atmosphere in Bosnia.
“The atmosphere of fear invades the people and prohibits them from carrying out one of the conditions for free and fair elections,” Nelson told a news conference. “They don’t have any assurance if they do try to test the limits that they will be protected, either by IFOR (the NATO-led peace force) or by local authorities,” she said.
Indicted war crimes suspects such as Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic also have to be removed from power before elections can be held, the group said. Otherwise, the international community will retain no credibility, they argued. With Karadzic and Mladic clinging to power, the Bosnian Serbs “have again challenged the Dayton agreements,” which Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. architect of the Bosnian peace plan, said Thursday are “very much at a crunch point.”
“We did not bring peace to Bosnia by ending the war,” Holbrooke, a former assistant U.S. secretary of state, said in a speech to graduates at the American University in Paris. |
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