Poll leaves Bosnian Serbs on edge of deep divide

Bosnian Serbs start voting today in parliamentary elections that may result in their territory being split into two. Marcus Tanner says the results threaten to plunge the former Yugoslav republic back into turmoil.

For a year-and-a-half, the Bosnian Serb former leader, Radovan Karadzic, has been locked in a battle for supremacy with his one-time ally, Biljana Plavsic. The quarrel revolves over whether the Serbs should co-operate with the West by carrying out the provisions of the American- backed peace deal for Bosnia, which was hammered out at Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995.

This weekend's vote will show which of the two factions has carried the day.

Mrs Plavsic insists that the Serbs have no choice now but to co-operate, if they are to build up a functioning state in the 49 per cent of Bosnia which Dayton awarded them.

Karadzic remains utterly unreconciled, which is not surprising, as the Dayton provisions demand the prosecution of war criminals, and he himself has been indicted by the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. Forbidden to stand for election by the Dayton terms, he remains the real master of his Serb Democratic Party.

The split is geographical, as much as political. Mrs Plavsic has her base in Banja Luka, capital of Bosnia's north-west, an area with a pre-war Serbian majority, and the home of Bosnian Serb (relative) political moderates. Karadzic's stamping ground is the war-ravaged east, governed from the old ski resort of Pale. In the towns of the east, such as Srebrenica, Muslims formed the majority before the war and the local Serbs are frantically suspicious that any co-operation with the West will mean their former Muslim neighbours - those the Serb militias didn't kill - returning home.

Mrs Plavsic claims her approach will result in Western loans that will enable the Bosnian Serbs' collapsed economy to recover. She also wants access to Washington's $400m "train and equip" programme for Bosnia. At the moment, this is supplying arms exclusively to the Muslim-Croat federation in the other 51 per cent of Bosnia, but Mrs Plavsic believes Bosnian Serbs can join in, too, if they co-operate.

If the two rivals triumph in their respective heartlands, the Bosnian Serb sub-state will split into two separate territories, with two hostile governments.

The split is already half-complete. The media and police in the east are run by Karadzic's men. In the north-west, Nato-led peace-keepers handed over the local television station and the transmitter to Plavsic supporters. It may not have helped the moderates in the long term, exposing them to nationalist charges of acting as puppets of the West.

Some observers predict that both Mrs Plavsic and Karadzic will see their vote slump and that the real winner will be the Bosnian branch of the Vojislav Seselj's Serbian Radical party.

This more or less openly fascist organisation promises hard work, ethnic purity and the union of all Serbs - whether the West likes it or not - in one big Serb state.

If either Seselj or Karadzic do well in the election, it will throw Western efforts to get the two Bosnian entities working together into a tail spin. For Seselj, Bosnia is simply a launching pad for greater things. His goal is to use Bosnia as a springboard to overthrow President Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia proper.