Vote for Peace Backers, Albright Warns Bosnians

BIJELJINA, Bosnia-Herzegovina —  Secretary of State Madeleine Albright waded into Bosnia’s crucial national election campaign Sunday, working both overtly and behind the scenes to promote candidates who pledge to rebuild the Balkan nation torn apart by 3 1/2 years of war and divided since by lingering ethnic hatreds.

Although elections have been held in Bosnia since the fighting here ended in late 1995, the upcoming vote--scheduled for Sept. 13-14--will mark the first time that ethnic Croats and Serbs have had a genuine choice between candidates. Moderates who support the peace accords reached in Dayton, Ohio, and the gradual re-integration of the country envisioned in those accords are running against ultranationalists hoping to capitalize on the fear and suspicion that remain powerful forces in the aftermath of the brutal war.

The main party of Bosnia’s third minority, its Muslims, has long backed the Dayton process.

For the United States and its major Western allies, the stakes in the elections are high.

The results could well determine the success or failure of the West’s multibillion-dollar effort to re-create the multiethnic republic of Muslims, Serbs and Croats that existed before the fighting began.

The United States has contributed about $2 billion annually over the past three years for the multinational military force deployed to support the Dayton accords. The Clinton administration will spend $240 million this year alone in development assistance to help rebuild the shattered country.

“The election will be a chance for people here to tell us what kind of country Bosnia should be, not the other way around,” Albright said in this onetime stronghold of Serbian arch-nationalists, where the residents are now said to be leaning toward moderate candidates.

But during her whistle-stop tour Sunday, Albright left little doubt that Bosnia will receive continued Western aid only if voters back candidates who support the Dayton accords and the democratic, multiethnic society they point toward.

“Whatever the outcome of the vote, we will provide assistance only to those communities that help implement Dayton, by welcoming refugees, by making joint institutions work, by upholding justice and the rule of law,” she said.

In case anyone missed that message here, Albright joined two prominent moderate candidates, Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic and Prime Minister Milorad Dodik, to formally reopen an electrical power substation refurbished with American aid that provides electricity to more than 100,000 people and to three industrial zones in the Bijeljina area.

At one point during the ceremony, Albright turned to Plavsic and asked: “Do people really know you are responsible for having this success? This is a good ticket.” Assistance such as that given the substation has boosted Serbian morale and the standing of those moderate politicians who helped bring it about.

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Later, Albright went by helicopter to the capital, Sarajevo, where she met with minority Croat refugees who have returned there. She praised their courage for coming back to what is now a Muslim-dominated city, urged them to vote and then repeated her earlier message that “communities committed to reconciliation will continue to receive aid and investment.”

Albright said the implications of the Bosnian elections could extend beyond Bosnia-Herzegovina to the nearby Serbian province of Kosovo, the latest Balkan region to be consumed by ethnic violence.

“Positive developments in Bosnia would influence possibilities in Kosovo, if people fighting each other four years ago are [seen] trying to live together again, developing common institutions where there were brutal activities before,” she said.

Bosnia’s highly complicated political system includes a tripartite national presidency, with one member representing each ethnic group, in addition to presidents and prime ministers for a separate constituent Serbian republic and a Muslim-Croat federation.

Albright began the day in the Croatian capital, Zagreb, where she pressed President Franjo Tudjman to accelerate democratic reforms in his own country and to stop trying to undermine moderate Croat candidates in the Bosnian elections via his country’s national television network--a network allegedly run largely from Tudjman’s office.

U.S. officials said that programming beamed into Croat-dominated areas of Bosnia is biased in favor or arch-nationalist Croats who back close ties with what they call the Croatian “motherland.”

Albright is scheduled to meet today with the Muslim member of Bosnia’s presidency, Alija Izetbegovic, as well as with commanders of the NATO-led force before departing for Moscow, where a U.S.-Russian summit is to begin Tuesday.