I hated to be missing Election Night 2000
in the United States but jumped at the chance when I was asked
by the State Department to make my fifth trip to Bosnia
to help supervise national and provincial elections there
on November 11. Little did I know that our own presidential
elections would play such an important part of my experience
in Bosnia, but I am getting ahead of myself.
The four year war in Bosnia, the fiercest
in Europe since World War II, had been brought to an end in
1995 by the Dayton Accord. That accord was pretty much jammed
down the throats of the warring parties by the United States,
Germany, France and Great Britain. The now infamous Slobodan
Milosevic of Yugoslavia was a reluctant partner to the agreement,
so anxious was he to see and end to sanctions against Yugoslavia.
Dayton called for the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe(OSCE) to supervise the
initial election in 1996. Little did most think that the OSCE
would have to supervise the five subsequent elections. And
the end is not in sight. The various governments elected over
the intervening years have been organized on ethnic lines
and have yet to devise a nationwide election law acceptable
to all of the factions.
Running elections in Bosnia has been a
serious expense for the OSCE member states, of which the United
States is an important one. The proportion each member contributes
to the election process determines the proportion of election
supervisors sent to Bosnia. It is my impression that the percentage
of Americans among the supervisors has declined since I first
started going to Bosnia in 1997, probably a result of declining
US contributions. Without research, however, I should emphasize
that this is just a hunch.
The 400 or so international supervisors
for the November elections in Bosnia assembled at Zagreb in
neighboring Croatia during the weekend preceding the elections.
Sarajevo, Bosnia's national capital, still does not have an
airport up to international standards or sufficient hotel
space to lodge that number of short term visitors. Good luck
smiled on us this time in the form of accomodations at the
five-star Zagreb Intercontinental. We were there for three
nights and two days of training in latest election procedures
before deploying by bus to our stations in Bosnia. Zagreb
is no tourist Mecca but had some pleasant neighborhoods and
is blessed with more than enough good restaurants for our
short stays at the beginning and end of our assignments to
Bosnia. The main plaza is the city's living room and a marvelous
place to hang out.
The big difference between supervising
this time and my previous four experiences (my first trip
to Bosnia had been for 10 weeks supervising election registration
rolls) was that each supervisor now overlooked five or six
polling stations instead of just one. This looser supervision
was made possible by the increased expertise of the Bosnian
election workers over the intervening years. Also, there has
been a history of a low rate of fraud during the previous
elections.
Since all of us had previous experience
in Bosnia, OSCE did its best to assign us to towns and cities
of our choice. Most wanted to return to a place where he or
she had made Bosnian friends. I had wanted to return to Bijeljina
in the Serb entity of Bosnia (Republika Srpska) but gladly
accepted to return to Tuzla in the Muslim/Croat entity, known
as the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The nomenclature
of the political units is confusing to say the least, and
I'd be happy to answer questions from anyone with a deeper
interest in the subject.
Tuzla is an industrial city with a large
dependence on its nearby deposits of salt and coal. Before
the Bosnian War, the population had a sizable Serb and Croat
population, perhaps almost 50 percent, but now the city is
almost exclusively Muslim. In Bijeljina, just across the entity
border, the opposite is true. At least the Tuzla Muslims left
the Serb Orthodox churches standing, whereas in Bijeljina,
all of the mosques, without exception, have been destroyed
and the stones and bricks carted away so as to leave no trace
of Muslim influence.
In Tuzla, most of us were housed in the
Bristol Hotel, a testimony to Yugoslavia's Communist past.
I occupied exactly the same room as I had in the fall of 1997.
It is still owned by the city, and I don't think one Bosnian
mark of new investment has been made since then. The shower
had not been repaired, and the black and white TV set had
the same thin wire stretched to the top of the armoire. Still,
I was happy to have hot water, a functioning toilet and a
clean bed. Some of the supervisors deployed to outlying villages
had to take sleeping bags and emergency cooking stoves with
them.
Tuzla did show some improvement overthe
past three years. The main thoroughfare of Old Town has been
turned into a beautifully designed walking street with one
cafe after another. I also had no trouble finding an Internet
Klub to read and send email everyday and read online US newspapers,
an important source of information on our own elections, as
it turned out. There was no CNN in Tuzla, and the only other
English-language news was every morning at 7 o'clock during
Deutsche Welle's (German's equivalent of the BBC) program.
I was fortunate to be assigned an excellent
interpreter and a conscientious driver, both young men. I
had not always been so lucky in the past. One huge advantage
this time was that they both had cell phones, so it was easy
to be in touch with the local OSCE office and each other.
The cell phones allowed me to let the young driver go see
his girlfriend instead of hanging around the polling stations
all day and way into the night during the counting of ballots.
By the time of the Bosnian elections on
November 11, the chaos in Florida was well known to all of
the Bosnians with whom I came into contact and, of course,
the other international supervisors. They all volunterred
to be flown to Palm Beach to help count the ballots honestly.
All of the Tuzla-ites who spoke up on the subject were strongly
pro-Gore. They are, of course, very afraid of a the US military
pullout suggested by Bush-advisor Condoleezza Rice.
The other international superiors were
mostly young European university graduates seeking experience
that would help them build up their résumés
in the search for work in international affairs. What an attractive
bunch they all were, mentally and physically. Why is obesity
an almost exclusively American phenomenum? In Tuzla, they
came from France, Portugal, Italy, Great Britain, Germany,
Poland, Belarus, Romania and Lithuania....and, oh yes, Canada.
My greatest joy of the trip came from sharing meals and drink
in the local restaurants and cafes.
I did not shirk my responsibilities of
keeping an eye on five polling stations, but a very large
segment of my time was spent explaining why the US Electoral
College was devised and how, as a result, a presidential candidate
could lose the popular vote but still win the presidency.
I finally devised a chart to show how it could happen. I confess
that I had not given much thought to the mechanics of the
Electoral College, and it was a bit of a challenge to my arithmetic
skills.
Suffice it to say, that the polling at
my stations went smoothly. The same was true, I understand,
throughout the two entities of Bosnia except in the few places
where Bosnian Serbs tried to keep Muslims from returning to
their original homes to vote. Also, there were areas where
HDZ, the main ethnic-Croat party, tried to hold a separate
referendum which would call for the secession of the ethnic-Croat
parts of the country and their annexation by Croatia.
Well, the elections were "free and fair,"
the OSCE's only stated objective. They were, however, no victory
for democracy since the various ultra-, super-, and hyper-nationalists
won throughout the country. I am convinced that renewed war
will follow any pull out of the military forces of the International
Community. I have neglected to point out that military forces
in Bosnia contain elements from Switzerland, Russia, the Ukraine
and perhaps other ex-USSR countries as well as NATO countries.
The election supervisors all partied at
Tuzla's best disco on
the eve of our return to Zagreb. At one point, a Russian official
joined me. His English was much better than my Russian and
together we regretted the "Good Old Days of the Cold War"
when neither of us would have left things go to hell in our
client states.
