Bosnian poll to finish job of ethnic cleansing

Bosnia-Herzegovina goes to the polls tomorrow in an election that will be dominated by the same nationalist leaders who led their communities into a disastrous ethnic war more than a decade ago.

An aggressive and bad-tempered campaign has left little doubt among the 2.7 million voters that deep rifts remain among Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs who share a language but not a common vision of the future.

Eleven years on from the nation forged from a war that claimed 100,000 lives, the big winners are set to be the nationalists from the three ethnic blocs, political heirs of the leaders who led them into the 1992-95 war that ended with the Dayton Peace Accords.

The complex power structure born of those accords in 1995 has left a state consisting of two entities, the autonomous Muslim-Croat federation, and the Serb Republic, overseen by a powerful international envoy who can impose laws and remove local officials.

Despite the international community's desire to declare a success in its Bosnia experiment, the call by the present German envoy, Christian Schwarz-Schilling, on candidates to leave the past behind has been roundly ignored. Mr Schwarz-Schilling's message to the voters - that "the leaders elected in the forthcoming poll have to take responsibility for the future of the country and to lead it toward Europe" - is seeming increasingly forlorn.

Aspiring candidates from the 56 parties and coalitions running the race for the tripartite presidency and central parliament have not even paid lip service to a common European future.

The agenda for most candidates has instead been stubbornly focused on the narrow interests of their own ethnic group, or as the Social-Democrat, Zlatko Lagumdzija, put it: "Parties had no concrete programmes. It was only about who [what ethnic group] did what to whom ... We are further from the European Union than ever before."

Where the future is concerned, Muslim Bosniaks insist on greater central authority for Sarajevo. The Catholic Croats, the smallest group, claim their existence is threatened without an entity of their own.

And Orthodox Serbs continue to eye closer ties with Serbia proper, disregarding that they live in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The international officials' optimism and the reality on the ground continue to differ profoundly, analysts warn.

While the officials tend to paint a picture of peace and security, leading human rights groups such as the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights argue that the country looks as if the ethnic cleansing, the gruesome trademark of the war, "has entered its final stage".

The return of some 2.2 million refugees displaced by the war, equivalent to half of the population, was at the heart of the Dayton accords. The aim was to recreate the pre-war ethnic balance in the country. This has not happened. Instead, people have grouped into the areas where their ethnic group was in the majority when the fighting stopped.

Despite official figures of about a million returns, human rights experts say the real figure is nearer 300,000. The others have only picked up local documents in their places of origin, quickly sold their property and moved. Some 500,000 people remain abroad.

For this reason, it is often heard in Bosnia-Herzegovina that the Dayton Peace Accords have failed and need to be changed. Oddly, critics say, no census was held in the country after the war because it would show the clear failure.

Bosnia-Herzegovina looks gloomy, particularly if one travels by car. There are no lights in the houses along the road through former Bosniak or Croat villages in the Serb Republic. The same goes for former Muslim villages in areas where Croats prevail now.

The picture of cemented ethnic restructuring is visible everywhere. The capital, Sarajevo, is 80 per cent Bosniak now, compared to 49 per cent before the war. Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia, where 72 per cent of the pre-war population were Bosniaks, is 90 per cent Serb now.

The Herzegovina town of Mostar, the pre-war home of 30 per cent of three ethnic groups each is now split in half between Bosniaks and Croats, with almost no Serbs. Bosnia-Herzegovina has not succeeded even in introducing the integrated education system. Curricula differ depending on ethnicity and heroes of one group are often the villains of others. Schools in ethnically mixed regions are segregated. Students use different parts of one building, and avoid meeting.

Analysts maintain that the key to these failures is the absence of reconciliation. With no side emerging as a clear winner when hostilities ended, peace was imposed through a lot of compromise on all sides.