Some Bosnian Voting May Be Postponed

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Amid a growing outcry over flaws in Bosnian voter registration, international officials said Friday that they are considering postponing municipal elections scheduled to take place in three weeks.

New registration figures reveal efforts by the Bosnian Serbs to stack the vote in strategic cities whose Muslim majorities were expelled during Bosnia’s war.

Through a loophole in election rules, thousands of Serbs living abroad appear to have been directed to vote in those cities to consolidate Bosnian Serb control of territory that had been “ethnically cleansed” of other groups through campaigns of terror and intimidation, officials said.

While the officials said the practice is technically legal, they added that this “electoral ethnic engineering” raises serious concerns about the fairness of voting in the cities. Carl Bildt, the international community’s senior civilian representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina, told the Reuters news service that voter registration in at least two cities was “obviously rigged.”

Several non-Serbian political parties, including the ruling Democratic Action Party, or SDA, of Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, threatened to boycott the election if municipal voting is not postponed.

“If our concerns are not addressed, SDA will reconsider taking part in the election,” Halid Genjac, the president of the party’s executive board, said Friday.

The agency in charge of supervising the elections, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, had joined the Clinton administration in insisting on going ahead with the Sept. 14 balloting, despite problems--including harassment of opposition candidates and violation of campaign rules.

But Friday, OSCE officials acknowledged that the postponement of some or all municipal voting is a possibility.

“It is an option under consideration,” agency spokeswoman Aggie Kuperman said.

The rest of the elections, including the vote for a three-person presidency, would be unaffected.

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After more than three hours of debate Friday, the Bosnian Election Commission failed to reach consensus on the registration issue. Bosnian Serb leaders want municipal voting to take place on schedule, and it was unclear how they would respond to any postponement.

“It is not possible to hold elections in only some municipalities,” said Slobodan Kovac, the Serbian member of the election commission. “Changing the election rules [this late] would cause chaos.”

Although the election is three weeks away, half a million refugees living abroad who will vote with absentee ballots--as opposed to those who will return to vote--will begin mailing ballots Wednesday.

The election rule in question allows Bosnians to vote in cities where they say they intend to live, as an alternative to voting in their current cities or their cities of residence before the war. All they must do is fill out a form indicating their intent and picking a city. The provision was aimed at facilitating the vote by refugees under the U.S.-brokered peace accord that ended Bosnia’s war and called for elections a speedy nine months later. But critics say this allows leaders to manipulate votes in various cities.

Short of delaying the municipal vote, election officials are also considering invalidating the troublesome registrations. But that move is also problematic because it could be seen as limiting those Bosnians’ access to the election process, human rights experts said.

Slightly more than 130,000 people, mostly Serbs living in Serbia, registered to vote in once-Muslim cities of Republika Srpska, the Serbian sector of Bosnia, OSCE figures show.