Bosnian Elections A Postmortem PDF Download

Excerpt from Bosnia Elections, a Postmortem: Hearing Before the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, One Hundred Fourth Congress, Second Session, September 19, 1996 The committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:15 a.m. in room 2172, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Benjamin A. Gilman, chairman of the committee, presiding. Chairman Gilman. Good morning. The meeting will come to order. The purpose of this morning's hearing is to review the results of the elections that were held in Bosnia last weekend. These elections, called for under the Dayton agreement, were to fill offices of the national three-man Presidency of the National House of Representatives and for the assemblies of the Republika Srpska and the Bosnian Croat Federation. While the elections in general were without any serious incident, for which we are all grateful and must commend our IFOR commanders for providing such good security, the preliminary indication is that they solidified the political position of hardline elements within each of the three ethnic groups in Bosnia. Our hearing today is to explore what the meaning of the elections is for Bosnia's future. Will they provide a basis for reconciliation and stability, or do they represent the first steps toward partition and the eventual dismemberment of Bosnia? We need also to focus on a few key questions regarding the elections themselves, including the level of the turnout and whether the Bosnian electorate was truly able to vote in the areas they wanted to vote in. We must also again examine the conditions in which election campaigns were conducted. Was there freedom of association and was there equal access to the media, or were these essential elements of a free and fair process ignored because of the need to press ahead with elections to fulfill the time table drawn up last year? Finally, we must also consider just what the elections mean for the role of the international community. While there seems to be a growing consensus among our European allies that some kind of international security force is going to be necessary in Bosnia after December 20 and for an unforeseeable period of time after that date, the Administration contends that such discussions are premature. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.