Bosnians vote amid escalating ethnic tension

SARAJEVO: Bosnians go to the polls yesterday to decide if their country will pursue a path towards European Union membership and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation integration or sink deeper into ethnic strife and further fragmentation.

More than two decades after a war in which 100,000 died, leading Serb, Croat and Muslim Bosniak parties are campaigning on nationalist tickets, reviving wartime pledges in programmes that fail to offer any clear economic or political visions.

About 3.35 million voters will take part in the presidential and parliamentary elections, choosing members of Bosnia’s tripartite inter-ethnic presidency, consisting of a Bosniak, a Croat and a Serb, and lawmakers for Parliament’s lower house.

They will also select leaders and assemblies of its two autonomous regions — the Serb Republic and the Bosniak-Croat Federation, and of the Federation’s 10 cantons.

In the run up to the vote, ethnic leaders spread fear using divisive rhetoric reminiscent of the war.

Campaigning has been marked by an unprecedented spate of violations, abuse of public funds and hate speech, monitors said.

Polling stations opened at 7am and closed at 7pm.

Nearly 7,500 candidates are running for 518 offices in a country of 3.5 million, reflecting a massive and complex government structure based on ethnic quotas, designed under a peace deal that ended the country’s 1992-95 war.