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Impressions from a Mission as an OSCE-observer of the elections in Bosnia-Hercegovina
by Sebastian Bred



Arrival
The first attempt to reach Sarajevo failed. After 10 minutes circling the airport, the pilot announced that we could not land because of bad weather. Back in Zagreb 400 OSCE supervisors filed through the transit in order to sit and wait. Standing in line for a plane to Copenhagen, I saw a couple of Danish IFOR soldiers and engaged them in conversation. They were stationed in the area of Doboj and coming to the end of their duty. Basically they found their job quite boring and I was surprised about the rather simple attitudes which they had to the complex political situation of the area.

First doubts about the mission of the OSCE arose when they spoke about Bosniac-Serbian relations in Doboj. Several Bosniacs had tried to return home within the  last couple of months. The first couple of times apparently nothing happened. Later their bodies were found on the outskirts of Doboj (4 incidents reported). The explanation from the soldiers? side is that the Bosnian Serbs observed the return of the Bosniacs and prepared for their arrival. This was my first impression of the area in which I was going to work in: boring and deadly... Finally we arrived in Sarajevo. TV-pictures of a destroyed capital ran through my brain while the plane rolled to a halt on a runway which was too short. At its end IFOR was waiting for us, surrounded by burnt out and shelled houses. A bus took us to the barely repaired terminal, where we waited to be checked into our mission as OSCE supervisors for the first elections in BiH after the end of the war. I managed to get an ID-card and save my luggage before it was sent off to Banja Luka. After several hours of confusion an Austrian military bus took us to Zenica.

Zenica
Even though I had seen the remnants of the war in Central-Bosnia, I was shocked by the outskirts of Sarajevo and had very little desire to see the rest of this once so lively city. A supervisor took a picture of Snipers Alley as we crossed it and I could not help smiling as the idea would never occur to me. Upon arrival in Zenica, I was surprised at our accomodation. The "dom penzioneiri", which had been closed throughout the war, had opened for the western supervisors to the luxurious price of 60 DM for a night. Our field officer came out and admitted that he was expecting somebody else. We were one day late and the briefing had already begun. The words of his assistant ("Welcome to hell") were not what I had expected considering the end of the war and the comfortable accomodation. The hotel was full of supervisors who were going to work in the area between Vitez, Doboj and Zenica. There were about 140 of us, including translators and drivers.

At first glance Zenica had not really changed. Many people, shops, police and military. But there was a basic difference between the city which I had lived in for several months in ?95 and the city I experienced this time: the ambience. Smiles on peoples faces, life in shops and cafes, activity and communication are hard to describe but easy to observe in Bosnia after the war. The briefing was finished after two days and finally we were ready to move towards our final destination, Tesanj. I was put in a team with Sabina (in her 30s, Swiss-Bosnian, a doctor), our translator Samir (DP = displaced person from Doboj, living in Tesanj) and our driver Hussein (Bosniac from Tesanj). Moving through the area north of Zenica for the first time in my life, Samir explained the different front lines and blockade lines as we passed them. Maglaj, Zepce, Doboj-South went by and again I saw house after house which had been set afire, shelled, shot at from close range. The area between Zenica and Tesanj is one of the areas where the alliance between the Bosniacs and Croats broke down and where both Serbs and Croats attacked the Bosniacs, and closed the roads for almost a year, leading to a famine in the area nobody will be able to forget. The maps showed the confrontation lines around these cities as heavily mined areas. Passing through Doboj-South I could see parts of Doboj, which today belongs to the Republika Srpska. The next weeks taught me a great deal about this city, its life before the war and the cruelties its Bosniac inhabitants had to go through. At first sight I only saw barbed wire, IFOR soldiers, burned down villages and one long road which led us to Tesanj.

Tesanj
As in Zenica the OSCE had organized accomodation for the group of supervisors beforehand in Tesanj. We arrived in the "Pansion Turist" and were received by the landlord with a drink in the meeting room. Upon the arrival in our rooms I realized that this was a rip off. In a 15m room there were 4 beds lined up, leaving no space for anything else. Everybody was supposed to pay 30 DM (one room 120 DM, which is more than an average monthly wage in the area). This included breakfast and showers, as well as a TV-room. As the OSCE had payed a deposit to the landlord in advance I was forced to stay there three nights before I moved to another location, where I slept alone in a room for 10 DM per night. Tesanj had been repaired since the end of the war. Nevertheless there were several buildings which still had holes from shelling and gun-fire. Both the mosque and the catholic church were damaged but in reasonable shape.

Facts
Between 28th August and 21st September 1996 I worked as an OSCE supervisor in the municipality of Tesanj (Central-Bosnia: Doboj-Zenica Muni-cipality). My assignment was to prepare the local teams (Polling Station Committees) in 9 Polling Stations for election day as well as being present in  the Polling stations during 14th September and in the counting procedure after
the election. 5 of our 9 Polling Stations were situated in small villages with a majority of Bosnian Croats. The Bosnian Croats have claimed their independence and, calling their area "USORA", see it as a part of Herceg-Bosna. Besides police, schools and a post office, they have established an independent civil administration. Nevertheless "USORA" has not been recognized by the federal authorities so far. Most of our Polling Stations were placed inside the Inter-Entitiy Boundary Line (IEBL). Due to the fact that the area was one of the main front lines during the war, an abundance of minefields restricted our freedom of mobility. According to the UNHCR, the population in the municipality of Tesanj consists of (numbers in brackets are taken from a census in 1991) 58,230 Bosniacs, including 15,511 displaced persons (34,938); 7,600 Bosnian Croats (8,952), and 210 Bosnian
Serbs (3,078).

Election Day
Observations and problems Each Polling Station was visited by us between 4 and 5 times during the day and several irregularities were observed. We were present in Miljanovci Novi and Miljanovci Stari during the closing of the Polling Stations. As IFOR could not find our Absentee Polling Stations in Jelah, we established contact with them and waited until IFOR arrived around
midnight. In the boxes you find a short introduction to the Polling Stations and the
problems during election day:


Problems concerning the Voting Procedure set up by OSCE

1.) Members of Polling Station Com-mittees belonged to the ruling party: In all our Polling Stations, the Committees were to 100% made up of members of the respective ruling party, being SDA or HDZ. In two Bosniac Polling Stations, a Bosnian Croat had been recruited by the Local Election Committee (LEC). Both withdrew on the day before election, due to pressure from both sides. The absence of opposition party members in the Polling Station Committee makes it impossible to ensure that the voting procedure is not
tampered with. Even party agents from the opposition do not represent real control, as they are intimidated by the overpowering presence of the ruling parties in the Polling Station Committees.

2.) It was too easy to manipulate the voting procedures: The positions of the Ink Controller, ID-Officer and the Ballot Issuer were sources of irregularities in most of our Polling Stations. Some of the Ink Controllers "forgot" to check the people in the queue. ID-Officers accepted documents which were questionable (e.g. ID-cards from "USORA"); refugees from other countries
who returned for the day were able to vote twice as nobody was able to check if they had done so already. Ballot Issuers violated voting procedures by instructing the voters which party to vote for, convincing them that they needed help behind the voting screen. In one case the Deputy Chairman even walked behind the voting screen in order to make sure that the voters did not make any mistakes. Most of the above named incidents were not entered into the Poll Books as the present party agents did not dare to do so.

3.) Mistakes in the Final Voters List: All in all, our team had about 100 persons in 7 Polling Stations who could not be found on the Final Voters List. The LEC decided to issue a document for these cases as long as the voters were able to prove their existence in the Provisional Voters List. Due to hundreds of applicants arriving within the morning of the 14th of September, the LEC decided that voters only needed to show an ID-card to the ID-Controller in order to be able to vote.