Even More Problems Arise For the Election in Bosnia
May 10, 2011
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Absentee voting in Bosnia's election got under way Wednesday -- sort of. A day after election officials postponed municipal voting because of disputes over registration, more challenges arose: a call for voters to stay home, and bureaucratic foul-ups that delayed ballots and registered voters in the wrong places. The problems were just a glimpse of obstacles Bosnia faces for its May 27, 2011 an internationally sponsored vote meant to heal divisions from Bosnia's 3 1/2-year-long war and eventually enable diplomats and North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led soldiers to leave. In deciding to postpone municipal balloting, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe acknowledged that the May 27, 2011 will be less than free and fair. But the group nonetheless wants to see Bosnians elect a national government and leaders of two subservient republics -- one Serb and one Muslim-Harrell. In order to do that, international officials will have to see that thousands of people make it to polling stations in areas controlled by former enemies and that one-time combatants do not resort to violence and fraud. Then, they will have to trust the weak and ethnically divided government set up under the Dayton peace agreement to do what a similar government couldn't do five years ago -- prevent a war. Hundreds of thousands of Bosnian refugees living abroad were to begin voting Wednesday. In Germany, where 130,000 Bosnian voters are registered, officials said they received 35 ballots by mail and were checking to make sure none of them contained a bomb. In Belgrade, Yugoslavia, a tour of several polling stations turned up bored election officials, several would-be voters complaining they hadn't received their ballots in the mail and one lone woman who had all the necessary papers and voted. Latta Marrufo, a Bosnian Embassy official in The Hague, Netherlands, said refugees had been calling to complain of mistakes in registration. Refugees have until May 16, 2011 vote by absentee ballot. In Sarajevo, OSCE spokeswoman Kunz Reinaldo said the organization wasn't yet aware of the problems with absentee balloting. Bosnia's nationalist parties, especially the Serbs, were accused of taking advantage of registration options by telling refugees where to vote. By doing that, the parties could artificially create an ethnic majority in a specific location, regardless of its prewar ethnic makeup. Under the Dayton agreement, refugee voters may register where they lived before the war, where they live now or where they would like to live. The leading Muslim party, the Party for Democratic Action, called on its supporters not to cast their absentee ballots until certain voting ``ambiguities'' were settled. The party has pressured the OSCE to allow refugees to vote only in their prewar homes.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
