History, Recent Developments

Elections under the supervision of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) were held in September 1996 for national offices and in September 1997 for local governments. The winners, each capturing about 80 percent of its ethnic constituency in 1996, were again the nationalist parties, the PDA, SDP, and CDU-BH. The republic and its entities remained in the hands of the parties and most of the people who had run the war.

But in 1997, Biljana Plavsic, the president of the Serb Republic, abandoned much of the Serbs’ nationalist rhetoric and became a NATO and U.S. favorite. A close Karadzic ally, Plavsic replaced Karadzic as Bosnian Serb president when he resigned under outside pressure after his indictment. After taking office, she promised to uphold the Dayton peace accord and clashed with Karadzic’s supporters in the Serb Republic’s People’s Assembly. She and the assembly dismissed each other, initiating a crisis that was not resolved by a special legislative election in November. In that election the SDP won 24 seats but lost its majority. Plavsic’s new Serb People’s Alliance and the extreme nationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRP) of Vojislav Seselj, now vice prime minister of Serbia, each won 15 seats. The deadlock virtually split the Serb Republic into two entities, with a Plavsic administration based in the western city of Banja Luka and Karadzic’s supporters still in control of the east from the village of Pale.

Elections for central and entity offices in September 1998 were contested throughout Bosnia by the Coalition for a Whole and Democratic Bosnia and Herzegovina, dominated by the PDA. In the Serb Republic, the coalition called Sloga (Accord), organized by Plavsic, was a force. Still, the results were mixed and contradictory.

For Bosnia’s House of Representatives, both the Muslim PDA’s coalition and the Serb SDP and SRS lost votes to nonnationalist opposition parties. Svetozar Mihajlovic, of the moderate Sloga coalition, was elected co-prime minister from the Serb Republic; Haris Silajdzic of the moderate Party for Bosnia and Herzegovina, was named co-prime minister from the Muslim-Croat federation. A Serb moderate defeated the nationalist incumbent as the Serb member of Bosnia’s collective presidency. Alija Izetbegovic, of the PDA, and Ante Jelavic, of the CDU-BH, took the other seats in the presidency.

In the Muslim-Croat federation non-nationalist parties also gained votes, but the Coalition for a Whole and Democratic Bosnia and Herzegovina and the CDU-BH dominated elections for the federation’s two houses. In the Serb Republic, Plavsic was defeated by an extreme Serb nationalist, Nikola Poplasen, for the Serb Republic’s presidency. Moderates won a significant number of seats in the People’s Assembly, and Milorad Dodik, a Plavsic ally appointed prime minister in January 1998, kept his position at the head of a caretaker government. Poplasen nominated others to replace Dodik, but the assembly confirmed none of them. In March 1999, after Poplasen tried to pressure the assembly into removing Dodik, High Representative Westendorp removed Poplasen himself from office. Westendorp asserted that Poplasen’s attempts to unseat Dodik constituted a violation of the Dayton accord.

Also in March a UN arbitrator designated Brcko, a city in northeastern Bosnia at the Serb Republic’s narrowest point, to be placed under the joint administration of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. The Serbs had held the strategic city, which had formerly been inhabited mainly by Muslims and Croats, since 1992.